Climate Change and Business Success

Tuesday 23rd February 2010
5.00pm GMT, 9.00am PST, 12.00pm EST

>> How can an environmental strategy benefit your business?
>> What are the costs and challenges of GHG emission compliance?
>> Can there be truly green business models?

Adapting businesses to the demands of climate change mitigation is a huge challenge, but one that can not only improve levels of environmental impact, but also enhance brands, motivate employees, increase operational efficiencies, and save money.

This Earthcast will examine the challenges posed by measuring, reducing, and offsetting emissions and the innovative solutions to common challenges currently being employed by businesses across the world.

Practical tips will cover everything from the easy actions that will cut waste of materials, water and energy and save you money, to the big changes in processes, products and business models.

Join the authors of The Three Secrets of Green Business and Doing Business in a New Climate for an event focusing on the challenges and opportunities that climate change poses for businesses of all sizes.

Gareth Kane, an environmental consultant, has worked with hundreds of organizations to improve their environmental performance. He has appeared as a media pundit on sustainability issues on the BBC Six O’Clock News, Countryfile and The Politics Show. In 2008 The Journal newspaper named Gareth as a ‘Rising Star, Future Leader’ for his work on sustainability.

Paul Lingl and Deborah Carlson both work for The David Suzuki Foundation, developing climate change solutions and greenhouse gas management strategies for businesses and other organizations.

20% Discount by typing EARTHCAST  when ordering any book at www.earthscan.co.uk.

Praise for the Earthcasts Series:

“Earthscan is performing a really valuable public service by enabling us all to listen to some the world’s best sustainability consultants and to be able to ask them questions.”
Rick Row, Sustainable Business Consultant

“Brilliant! I found the session to be informative and very relevant to current events. Keep up the good work.”
Nana Guar, Research Analyst, Sustainability Excellence

“Well timed, well chaired, well presented – smoothest webcast I’ve seen!”
Deviah Aiama, Policy Analyst, Natural Resources Canada

“An excellent way of hearing about recent developments from leading thinkers in the field.”
Dr Sarah Dalrymple, Teaching Fellow in Ecology, University of Aberdeen

Further information

To view an archived version of all previous events, visit www.earthscan.co.uk/earthcasts

The slides used in each presentation are also available.

from:  jfalk at unimelb.edu.au

The Hon Helen Clark – Administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Former Prime Minister of New Zealand – addressed a crowded room of distinguished guests at her launch of

“Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance Across a Stressed Planet” (Edward Elgar, UK) by Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk,

on Friday 12 February, in Sydney, Australia.

She gave a strongly supportive analysis of “this remarkable book”.

Further details of the new book are available at http://worlds-in-transition.com

The book covers: The current state and dynamics of the evolution of governance of development, climate, information, the economy, health and security -  in this 670 page book.

Contents: Preface 1. Introduction 2. Human Organisation: The Evolutionary Context 3. Governance in the Context of Human Evolution 4. The Modern Epoch and its Limits 5. Economic Governance 6. Governing Atmospheric Flows 7. A Defining Issue of Our Time 8. The Evolving Governance of Information Flows 9. Governance, Pathogens and Human Health 10. Globalisation of Insecurity in the Era of Hegemonic Decline 11. Towards a New Security Discourse and Architecture 12. A Holoreflexive Epoch in the Making? Bibliography Index.

In his pre-publication review of the book James H. Mittelman, American University, USA writes: “At a time of overspecialization in the knowledge industry, it is energizing to read a book that navigates the social, humanistic, and natural sciences. Do Camilleri and Falk succeed in this bold venture? Yes, profoundly! Their tour d’horizon is a romantic journey, a love affair with traversing different branches of learning. Gracefully composed, Worlds in Transition also offers insights into the perils of our era and issues a clarion call for a system of multi-tiered governance to address them.”

 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23630?ut…

Volume 57, Number 3 · February 25, 2010 , The New York Review of Books

A Deal With the Taliban?
Ahmed Rashid
The war in Afghanistan now faces a pivotal moment: at stake is whether the US and its allies are willing to talk to the Taliban. General Stanley McChrystal has a special fund of $1.5 billion to provide incentives to Taliban fighters who put down their arms. Senior Pakistani officials now say they have offered to help broker talks between Taliban leaders, the Americans, and Karzai. For their part, the Taliban have shown the first hint of flexibility, following secret talks in Saudi Arabia last year. But talking to the Taliban requires more than just secret cooperation among intelligence agencies or the CIA handing out bribes. What can be done?
A Deal with the Taliban?
By Ahmed Rashid

My Life with the Taliban.
by Abdul Salam Zaeef,

translated from the Pashto and edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn
Columbia University Press, 331 pp., $29.95
1.

For thirty years Afghanistan has cast a long, dark shadow over world events, but it has also been marked by pivotal moments that could have brought peace and changed world history.

One such moment occurred in February 1989, just as the last Soviet troops were leaving Afghanistan. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had flown into Islamabad—the first visit to Pakistan by a senior Soviet official. He came on a last-ditch mission to try to persuade Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the army, and the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to agree to a temporary sharing of power between the Afghan Communist regime in Kabul and the Afghan Mujahideen. He hoped to prevent a civil war and lay the groundwork for a peaceful, final transfer of power to the Mujahideen.

By then the Soviets were in a state of panic. They ironically shared the CIA’s analysis that Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah would last only a few weeks after the Soviet troops had departed. The CIA got it wrong—Najibullah was to last three more years, until the eruption of civil war forced him to take refuge in the UN compound in April 1992. The ISI refused to oblige Shevardnadze. It wanted to get Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the seven disparate Mujahideen leaders and its principal protégé, into power in Kabul. The CIA had also urged the ISI to stand firm against the Soviets. It wanted to avenge the US humiliation in Vietnam and celebrate a total Communist debacle in Kabul—no matter how many Afghan lives it would cost. A political compromise was not in the plans of the ISI and the CIA.

I was summoned to meet Shevardnadze late at night and remember a frustrated but visibly angry man, outraged by the shortsightedness of Pakistan and the US and the clear desire of both governments to humiliate Moscow. He went on to evoke an apocalyptic vision of the future of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the region. His predictions of the violence to come turned out to be dead right.

At that pivotal moment, if Shevardnadze’s compromise had been accepted, the world might well have avoided the decade-long Afghan civil war, the destruction of Kabul, the rise of the Taliban, and the sanctuary they provided al-Qaeda. Perhaps we could have avoided September 11 itself—and much that has followed since, including the latest attempt by a Nigerian extremist to blow up a transatlantic airliner, the killing of seven CIA officers at an Afghan base, and the continuing heavy casualties among NATO troops and Afghan civilians in Afghanistan.

With Obama’s controversial and risk-laden plan to first build up and then, in eighteen months, start drawing down US troops in Afghanistan, every nation and political leader in the region now faces another pivotal moment. At stake is whether the US and its allies are willing to talk to the Afghan Taliban, because there is no military victory in sight and no other way to end a war that has been going on for thirty years.

When that moment comes—as it must—will the US and NATO be ready to talk with the Taliban or will they be internally divided, as they are now? Will President Hamid Karzai have the credibility to take part in such talks and deliver on an agreement that might be reached? Will the ISI demand that their own Taliban protégés return to power? Will the Taliban hard-liners, now scenting victory, even agree to talks and, as a consequence, be prepared to dump al-Qaeda? Or will they sit out the next eighteen months waiting for the Americans to begin to leave?

2.

The Afghan Taliban are now a country-wide movement. During the last year they expanded to the previously quiet west and north of Afghanistan. Their leadership has safe havens in Pakistan. Casualties on all sides have risen dramatically. According to the UN, in 2009 there were an average of 1,200 attacks a month by Taliban or other insurgent groups—a 65 percent increase from the previous year. Over the twelve-month period, 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed, an increase of 14 percent; of those, two thirds were killed by the Taliban, a 40 percent increase. In addition, US and NATO combat deaths rose 76 percent, from 295 in 2008 to 520 in 2009.

Adding to the challenges facing the Afghan government, over the years it has been difficult to recruit Pashtuns for the Afghan army and police from the southern Pashtun provinces that are largely controlled by the Taliban, although recently Pashtun recruitment has increased following a pay rise for security forces. Even so, the Taliban have infiltrated parts of the Afghan army and police—the key components of the US plan to start the handover of power to local forces by July 2011. In large parts of Afghanistan, development programs have come to a halt and nearly half of the UN staff assigned to Afghanistan have been relocated to Dubai and Central Asia because of security concerns.

According to Major General Michael Flynn, the NATO military chief of intelligence in Afghanistan, the Taliban now have shadow governors in thirty-three out of thirty-four provinces—they serve to organize the movement at a provincial level and disrupt government initiatives in their area—and the movement “can sustain itself indefinitely.” Flynn has described US intelligence in Afghanistan as “clueless” and “ignorant.”*

Taliban commanders have stepped up their vicious campaign to intimidate or kill any Afghan civilians working for the Karzai government, aid agencies, women’s groups, and even the UN. On January 18, militants launched a double suicide attack just yards from the presidential palace in central Kabul, provoking a gun battle in which three soldiers and two civilians were killed and more than seventy wounded. “We are now at a critical juncture…. The situation cannot continue as is if we are to succeed in Afghanistan,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the UN Security Council earlier in the month. “There is a risk that the deteriorating overall situation will become irreversible,” he added.

The prevailing view in Washington is that many Taliban fighters in the field can eventually be won over, but that the present US troop surge has to roll them back first, reversing Taliban successes and gaining control over the population centers and major roads. According to the current American strategy, the US military has to weaken the Taliban before negotiating with them. The commander of US and NATO forces, General Stanley McChrystal, has both a special fund of $1.5 billion to provide incentives and other forms of support to Taliban who put down their arms, and a group of British and American officers who are drawing up plans to win over Taliban commanders and fighters as the troop surge tilts the battlefield back in favor of the US. General McChrystal told me in Islamabad in early January that he is confident that many Taliban will be won over in the field. This US reconciliation effort would be led by Karzai, who for several years has called for talks with Taliban leaders.

There is another way of looking at the present crisis. Despite their successes, the Taliban are probably now near the height of their power. They do not control major population centers—nor can they, given NATO’s military strength and air power. There are no countrywide, populist insurrections against NATO forces as there were against the coalition forces in Iraq. The vast majority of Afghans do not want the return of a Taliban regime despite their anger at the Karzai government and the general international failure to deliver economic progress. Many Afghans believe that as long as Western troops remain, there is still the hope that security can return and their lives change for the better.

Thus the next few months could offer a critical opportunity to persuade the Taliban that this is the best time to negotiate a settlement, because they are at their strongest.

3.

Both Generals McChrystal and David Petraeus, the head of the US military’s Central Command, have said that they cannot shoot their way to victory. Obama is clear about defeating al-Qaeda, but he is more inclined toward negotiations with the Taliban. In his West Point speech in December, Obama said he supported Kabul’s efforts to “open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.”

The present US military strategy aims to peel away Taliban commanders and fighters and resettle them without making any major political concessions or changes to the Afghan constitution. But Washington remains deeply divided about talking to the Taliban leaders. The State and Defense Departments, the White House, and the CIA all have different views about it, and there are also divisions between the US and its allies.

General McChrystal told me that many mid-level Taliban commanders and their men are waiting for Karzai to announce a reconciliation strategy before offering to change sides. “The reintegration of former Taliban into society offers a good chance to reduce the insurgency in Afghanistan…while al-Qaeda needs to be hunted and destroyed.” Whether the US and its allies should hold talks with the Taliban leadership, he said, is a political decision to be made by Washington. In December Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me that in his estimation some 70 percent of the Taliban fight for local reasons or money rather than because of ideological commitment to the movement, and they can be won over.

Meanwhile the Taliban have shown the first hint of flexibility, as suggested in a ten-page statement issued in November 2009 for the religious festival of Eid. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar, while urging his fighters to continue the jihad against “the arrogant [US] enemy,” also pledged that a future Taliban regime would bring peace and noninterference from outside forces, and would pose no threat to neighboring countries—implying that al-Qaeda would not be returning to Afghanistan along with the Taliban. Sounding more like a diplomat than an extremist, Omar said, “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan wants to take constructive measures together with all countries for mutual cooperation, economic development and good future on the basis of mutual respect.”

A week later, the Taliban’s response to Obama’s West Point speech again suggested a changed attitude. There was not a single mention of jihad or imposing Islamic law. Instead the Taliban spoke of a nationalist and patriotic struggle for Afghanistan’s independence and said they were “ready to give legal guarantee if the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan.” In a New Year’s message the Taliban, while condemning the US surge, even seemed to empathize with Obama, observing that the American president faces “a great many problems and opposition” at home.

The Taliban’s new tone can be traced to secret talks in the spring of 2009. Sponsored by Saudi Arabia at Karzai’s request, the talks included former (or now retired) Taliban, former Arab members of al-Qaeda, and Karzai’s representatives. No breakthrough took place, but the talks led to a series of visits to Saudi Arabia by important Taliban leaders during the rest of 2009. The US, British, and Saudi officials who were indirectly in contact with the Taliban there quickly encouraged them to renounce al-Qaeda and lay out their negotiating demands. In turn, the Taliban said that distancing themselves from al-Qaeda would require the other side to meet a principal demand of their own: that all foreign forces must announce a timetable to leave Afghanistan.

Istakhbarat, the Saudi intelligence service, is not set up to produce political results, but it has given the Taliban a safe venue to meet and it has acted as an interlocutor with Afghan government and Western officials. Significantly the ISI, which has demanded a key part in the negotiations from its erstwhile Saudi allies, has so far been left out at the request of both the Taliban and the Afghan government—neither of whom trust it. That now may be about to change. The key to more formal negotiations with Taliban leaders lies with Pakistan and the ISI.

4.

Tensions between the US and Pakistan have escalated in recent months as Washington demands that the Pakistani military “capture or kill” Afghan Taliban leaders as well as top militants in Pakistan. These include the Afghan Taliban leadership living in Quetta and Karachi, as well as their allies such as Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who live in North Waziristan in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan. Pakistan says it is too busy dealing with its own acute problems with the Pakistani Taliban and a growing number of terrorist attacks by various insurgent groups. Its forces are overstretched, it has little money, and it will oblige the Americans only when it is ready to do so. In fact Pakistan would never launch a military offensive against the Afghan Taliban leaders since it has viewed them as potential allies in a post-American Afghanistan, when the US will probably ditch Pakistan as well.

Pakistan’s military is deeply fearful of a US withdrawal from Afghanistan; the result could be civil war and mayhem in its backyard once again. “We want the American surge to succeed in Afghanistan, because if they don’t we will pay the price,” a senior Pakistani military officer told me. The army is also convinced that the US will eventually align itself with India and that it has allowed India to strengthen its influence in Kabul at Pakistan’s expense. Despite all the sacrifices it has made for the Afghans over thirty years, supporting them against the Soviets, Pakistanis are now friendless in Afghanistan—except for the Afghan Taliban, who are more wary than friendly toward the ISI.

To regain influence in Afghanistan and drive the Indians out once the Americans leave, the Pakistan military could, as an alternative, back the Taliban in a plan to retake Kabul and set up a government that would do Pakistan’s bidding. However, that possibility is now too risky; the international community would never tolerate it, and such a regime would also provide a base from which the Pakistani Taliban could launch further attacks in Pakistan.

In a major policy shift, senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials say they have offered to help broker talks between Taliban leaders, the Americans, and Karzai. “We want the talks to start now, not in eighteen months when they are leaving; but the Americans have to trust and depend on us,” a senior military officer told me. There is a deep lack of trust between the CIA and the ISI, and other countries may also balk at Pakistan’s insistence that all negotiations should be channeled through the ISI. Pakistani officials suggest that if the ISI helps arrange talks, then independent contacts between Taliban leaders and the CIA, British intelligence (MI6), and Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) would have to stop. In return, Pakistani officials say only that they want to be sure “that Pakistan’s national interests in Afghanistan are looked after”—interests that have yet to be clearly spelled out to the Americans and Afghans.

This is an important change in the official position of Pakistan. For the past nine years—despite the well-known connections between the ISI and the Afghan Taliban—Pakistan has denied that it has influence over the Taliban leaders, and openly playing host to them was considered out of the question. Pakistan will have to make serious efforts to gain the confidence of the US and the Afghans if it is to sponsor negotiations with the Taliban; but their differences could be worked out through arrangements made between the various intelligence agencies and governments involved. Senior US officials say that Pakistan is showing itself to be “more flexible” on Afghan policy than before.

How will the Taliban leaders respond? Many of them are fed up with years of ISI manipulation and strategizing on their behalf and would prefer to keep the ISI out of such talks. Some members of the Taliban have built up a rapport with Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, the domestic intelligence agency of the Kabul government. The NDS and the ISI loathe and mistrust each other, and the NDS would be extremely reluctant to allow the ISI a central part in negotiations. Moreover, the crucial acceptance of reconciliation with the Taliban has to come from the non-Pashtun population in the north who are extremely hostile to the Taliban and the ISI. If the northern ethnic groups who make up just over 50 percent of the population do not accept the reconciliation plan, there could be a renewed civil war as in the 1990s.

But the ISI has power and influence over the Taliban. Not only are the Taliban able to resupply their fighters from Pakistan, and seek medical treatment and other facilities, but the families of most Taliban leaders live in Pakistan where they own homes and run businesses and shops. Taliban leaders travel to Saudi Arabia on Pakistani passports. All this makes them vulnerable to ISI pressure. Even before the US military can consider coopting mid-level Taliban commanders, both sides would have to ascertain how this would play with the ISI.

The Pakistani army’s desperate desire to have some control over future events in Afghanistan is partly due to its strategic aim of avoiding encirclement by India; but it is also a result of the setbacks it has received since 2001. The military is still smarting from former President Bush’s decisions to allow the anti-Pakistan Northern Alliance to take Kabul in 2001, to ignore Islamabad’s later requests for consultations on US strategy in Afghanistan, and to treat all Afghan Pashtuns as potential Taliban. This helped radicalize Pakistan’s own Pashtun population, which is more than twice the size of Afghanistan’s. (There are 12 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and 27 million in Pakistan.)

5.

Talking to the Taliban requires more than just secret cooperation among intelligence agencies or the CIA handing out bribes to Taliban commanders to change sides—as it did with the Northern Alliance in 2001. There is an urgent need for a publicly promoted strategy involving concrete efforts to build political institutions and provide humanitarian aid in ways that do not require intrusive Western control—a strategy that could attract many members of the Taliban, reduce violence, and placate Afghans who are opposed to all such compromises. Obama officials have talked up the need for such a public strategy but accomplished little during his first year in office. Yet such goals are of paramount importance.

Here are some suggestions of steps that should be taken in advance of talking to the Taliban. Almost all these points have theoretically been accepted by the US and NATO but none have been acted upon:

Convince Afghanistan’s neighbors and other countries in the region to sign on to a reconciliation strategy with the Taliban, to be led by the Afghan government. Creating a regional strategy and consensus on Afghanistan was one of the primary aims of the Obama administration; but little has been achieved. From Iran to India, regional tensions are worse now than a year ago.
Allow Afghanistan to submit to the UN Security Council a request that the names of Taliban leaders be removed from a list of terrorists drawn up in 2001—so long as those leaders renounce violence and ties to al-Qaeda. Russia has so far refused to entertain such a request; but Obama has not tried hard enough to extract this concession from Russian leaders.
Pass a UN Security Council resolution giving the Afghan government a formal mandate to negotiate with the Taliban, and allow the US, NATO, and the UN to encourage that process. This would mean persuading reluctant countries like Russia and India to support such a resolution. (On January 27, a UN Security Council committee announced, with Russian agreement, that it has lifted sanctions against five former Taliban officials who are said to support the Karzai government.)
Have NATO and Afghan forces take responsibility for the security of Taliban and their families who return to Afghanistan, enlisting the help of international agencies such as the UN High Commission for Refugees or the International Committee of the Red Cross to work with the Afghan government to assist these returning Taliban members, arranging for compensation, housing, job training, and other needs they may have in facing resettlement.
Provide adequate funds, training, and staff for a reconciliation body, led by the Afghan government, that will work with Western forces and humanitarian agencies to provide a comprehensive and clearly spelled-out program for the security of the returning Taliban and for facilities to receive them.
Encourage the Pakistani military to assist NATO and Afghan forces in providing security to returning Taliban and their families and allow necessary cross-border support from international humanitarian agencies. Encourage Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to help the Taliban set up a legal political party, as other Afghan militants—such as former members of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami party—have done. This would be a tremendous blow to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban and it would give concrete form to Obama’s repeated pledge that he is ready to reach out to foes in the Muslim world.
The Taliban leadership should be provided with a neutral venue such as Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, where it can hold talks with the Afghan government and NATO. The US should release the remaining Afghan prisoners held at Guantánamo and allow them to go to either Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia.
Unless such publicly announced policies are carried out, the Taliban may well conclude that it is better and safer to sit out the next eighteen months, wait for the Americans to start leaving, and then, when they judge Afghanistan to be vulnerable, go for the kill in Kabul—although that would only lead to a renewed civil war.

6.

Just as Afghanistan faces a crucial choice, we have a book that for the first time places readers at the heart of the Taliban’s way of thinking—My Life with the Taliban, by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban minister and ambassador to Pakistan, who spent over four years in Guantánamo prison. Originally published in Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns, the book has been beautifully translated and extensively edited for easier understanding by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, two researchers who live in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.

Zaeef was born in 1968 and grew up in a small dusty village in Kandahar province. Like many Taliban, he came from a family of mullahs and grew up an orphan, having lost his parents at an early age. Economic development never penetrated such Afghan villages as his and daily life was centered on learning at the madrasa, farming, and sustaining the Pashtun tribal code of honor and revenge. His extended clan fled to Pakistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion, but at the age of fifteen he secretly returned home to fight the Soviets. In the 1980s he served under several commanders, including Mullah Omar.

Zaeef dramatically brings to life the extremely harsh conditions under which the Afghans fought—without food, medical aid, or enough ammunition, and under constant Soviet bombardment:

When I first joined the jihad I was fifteen years old. I did not know how to fire a Kalashnikov or how to lead men. I knew nothing of war. But the Russian front lines were a tough proving ground and…I eventually commanded several mujahedeen groups.
After the Soviets left Afghanistan, Zaeef became a mullah in a small village near Kandahar. He describes how the situation deteriorated in the south as warlords and criminals extracted tolls from trucks on the road, kidnapped and raped women, and held young boys captive to become their forced lovers. Zaeef was one of the original Taliban; in the winter of 1994 he joined with like-minded young men to work out a strategy for dealing with the warlords.

He was and remains intensely loyal to Mullah Omar, who would, he writes,

listen to everybody with focus and respect for as long as they needed to talk, and would never seek to cut them off. After he had listened, he then would answer with ordered, coherent thoughts.
When Zaeef attended the founding meeting of the Taliban, each man took an oath of loyalty to Omar. That oath is still in effect, which is why no senior Taliban commander has ever betrayed the whereabouts of Omar. As the Taliban started to conquer Afghanistan, Zaeef was promoted from one job to the next.

fter the Taliban capture of Kabul in 1996, Zaeef was moved to the defense ministry where, he writes, the weekly budget for the various Taliban militias fighting the Northern Alliance was $300,000 a week, or just $14 million a year. By 1999, when the Taliban controlled 80 percent of the country, their entire annual budget was just $80 million—from the Islamic taxes the Taliban imposed as well as donations from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and, after 1996, Osama bin Laden (although Zaeef does not mention his contribution). He describes a chaotic and uncoordinated government:

The budget didn’t even come close to what was needed in order to start any serious development; it was like a drop of water that falls on a hot stone, evaporating without leaving any trace.
Early in his book Zaeef describes his intense hatred for the ISI, which deepened in 2000 when he was appointed Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. He claims he resisted being recruited by the ISI. “In my dealings with them I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.” He describes how “the ISI extended its roots deep into Afghanistan like a cancer puts down roots in the human body,” and how “every ruler of Afghanistan complained about it, but none could get rid of it.” Zaeef set up his own clandestine network of Pakistani officials who provided him information about what the ISI was planning regarding the Taliban.

What Zaeef omits or fudges is significant. He makes no mention of the ISI’s financial and material support to the Taliban, and says hardly anything about al-Qaeda or how his hero Mullah Omar became so close to Osama bin Laden. He has nothing to say about the Taliban’s repressive attitudes toward women, including the ban on their education, and he makes no mention of the Taliban’s harsh punishments, including public stonings.

By 2001, after UN sanctions restricted the Taliban’s international contacts, Zaeef became the only Taliban leader who could meet with US and Western envoys. His relationship with the US embassy in Islamabad was dominated by American demands to hand over Osama bin Laden. In the days after September 11, he frantically tried to stave off the impending US attack on his country by appealing to Western embassies, writing letters to the UN, and trying to enlist support from Islamic countries. He met with Mullah Omar, who was convinced that the Americans would not dare attack. In Omar’s mind, Zaeef writes, “there was less than a 10 percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats and so an attack was unlikely.”

In January 2002 he was turned over to the Americans by the ISI—sold, according to him—and ended up in Guantánamo. He now lives in Kabul under government protection and his final plea is for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan. He says he does not believe in al-Qaeda, but speaks as an Afghan patriot with strong Islamist leanings toward the Taliban. Afghanistan, he writes, is “a family home in which we all have the right to live…without discrimination and while keeping our values. No one has the right to take this away from us.” Can Afghanistan ever be a peaceful home for all Afghans? They certainly deserve it.

—January 27, 2010

Notes
*See Noah Shachtman, “‘Afghan Insurgency Can Sustain Itself Indefinitely’: Top U.S. Intel Officer,” Wired.com, January 8, 2010. General Flynn’s briefing, called ” State of the Insurgency: Trends, Intentions and Objectives,” was presented on December 23, 2009. Also see “NATO Official: US Spy Work Lacking in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, January 5, 2010.

from    Luis Gutierrez <luisgutierrez@peoplepc.com>

date    Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 12:56 AM
subject    Pelican Journal of Sustainable Development
 http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv06n02…

Page 1 is a book review of “State of the World 2010″:
Transforming Cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability
By Erik Assadourian & Staff, Worldwatch Institute, 2010

Pages 2 to 4 are three invited articles:

- Truth and Consequences on the Last Frontier
by Richard Steiner, University of Alaska-Anchorage, USA
 http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv06n02…

- Woman as “Other” in Monotheistic Religious Discourse
by Zilka Spahic-Šiljak, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
 http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv06n02…

- A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030
by Mark Jacobson & Mark Delucchi, Stanford University, USA
 http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv06n02…

There are also two supplements: one is on news and tools for sustainable
development, and the other is a directory of online reference material.

————————————
Luis T. Gutierrez, Ph.D.
The Pelican Web
Editor, PelicanWeb Journal of Sustainable Development
 http://www.pelicanweb.org

At The Foreign Policy Association, New York, Wednesday, January 13, 2010, in the Grupo Santander building Auditorium, there was a meeting with Dr. Julia E. Sweig who wrote the book: “CUBA: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW.”

Julia Sweig is Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies & Director for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

She has authored several reports on Latin America and American Foreign Policy. Her book “Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground” of 2002 received an award for the best book of the year by an independent scholar from the American Historical Association.

The meeting was chaired by Ambassador Viktor Polgar, Consul General of Hungary in New York City.

Dr. Sweig started out by saying that she was part of the US culture relating to Latin America – that educated in Spanish language also lots of Cuban students  and studies about Cuba but nothing in Portuguese or Brazil, implying that in the US Cuba got much too thigh attention then it deserved – and Brazil much less attention then it deserved. But even so, in effect Cuba was in a dormant state so far as US direct involvement, until the switch from Fidel to Raoul.

The discussion with Cuba was always difficult. Cuba was focusing on history while the US was looking to the future.

2006 – 2007 changes start in Havana and the Miami Cubans find this important – then 2007-2008 Raoul begins to look at domestic issues in Cuba and starts to talk of dirty laundry of the regime. On February 2008 he takes office in a 34 minutes speech – a novelty to who was used to the unending Fidel rhetoric. He skips the gov’t talk to improve the life and says that inefficiency will be removed. He eliminates control of Cubans travel abroad. There seems to be a new government, new people, new ways of doing things – and expectations started to be high. With the changes in the US – President Obama suggested in april 2009 to open a new chapter.

——-

In Miami, the last decade the Cuban Americans shift from the call for embargo to a people-to-people family oriented approach. This in South Florida more then in New Jersey. Miami is now for the first time ahead of Washington asking for change.

Since 2001 there were exchanges with Cuba, but then they were stopped by the Bush Administration – including the remittances. Then came the war on Iraq and the notion of regime change that ruffled Cuba. All what started before Bush years was now suspicious

President Lula and Spanish PM Zapatero are pushing Washington for change in regard to Cuba. Indeed, in Trinidad the US allowed the return of Cuba to the OAS, and in Congress there is now a bill to remove travel restrictions and to take Cuba of the terrorism lists.

Clearly, the US is not the final decider in Cuba – but it has a role to play in Cuba changing.

Former Congressman John Brandemas said that President Bush restricted Microsoft and Google in regards to Cuba, as Cuba also reacted with restrictions. In effect the same day as this meeting at the FPA, the New York Times had an article about a communications contractor who was arested in Cuba, Alan P. Gross, who was working with local groups to make sure they are capable of using internet communication.

Questions abunded about how long will it take to get to “YES WE CAN.” It was pointed out that $9,000 gets a Congressman’s vote and this is a reason for the bottleneck. The Cuban Americans still hold the game, even though they would like to see change.

The facts are that after the US and Canada, Cuba is third on medical issues in the hemisphere. Cuba helped Chavez consolidate his power and they like him to take out oxygen of Latin America.

—————

Further, let us recommens CUBA – La Isla Grande, Edited by Martino Fagiuoli, a 2007, Fall River Press, New York, printed in China, an album about Cuba with photos taken in the 1990s. The country seems to be ready to stick it out until the US changes its attitude towards the island.

From: Shehnaz <peaceingardens@comcast.net>
Date: Fri, Jan 29, 2010
Subject: [Cmes-events] Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers Presents: Moroccan Born Artist Lalla Essaydi.

Exhibition Opening Jan. 30 Sat through June 6 2010!

The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers will be showcasing its first Arab artist on January 30, 2010. We are proud to be
promoters of this extraordinary event. CMES encourages students, faculty and the community to show their support by
visiting the exhibit at Rutgers. In order to encourage future exhibits at the Zimmerli, from the Middle East, there must be
support from the Rutgers and extended community.

Lalla Essaydi is a talented photographer, who deconstructs the Oriental European paintings from the 19th century and
covers them in Arabic calligraphic script. The photographs are stunning, large scale photos which will surely give people
of all walks of life, a new consideration of stereotypes that continue to define the Middle East and North Africa.

*****************************************************************************************************************************

ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM AT RUTGERS PRESENTS LARGE-SCALE

COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE MOROCCAN-BORN ARTIST LALLA ESSAYDI

New Brunswick, NJ — The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers features the latest body of work by the New York-based, Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi in Les Femmes du Maroc from January 30 to June 6, 2010. Seventeen large-format color photographs will portray Moroccan women in tableaux based on famous examples of 19th-century European and American Orientalist paintings and covered in Arabic calligraphic script. A selection of Orientalist works from the museum’s extensive collections of European graphic art will also be on display to provide a cultural context for Essaydi’s work.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

The photographer, painter, and installation artist Lalla Essaydi was raised in Morocco and lived in Saudi Arabia before studying at the L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and completing her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/TUFTS University, in Boston, MA (2003). Her work is represented in private and public collections around the world, including the Louvre Museum, Paris; the British National Museum, London; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Art Institute of Chicago.  Lalla Essaydi is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City, and Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston.

Each photograph is the culmination of careful staging. Essaydi arranged the models, all female friends and acquaintances, in poses based on Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s The  Grand Odalisque (1814), Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Slave Market (1867), Eugene Delacroix’s Women of Algiers (1834) and other well-known paintings.  She removed the male figures and all color and decorative details, draping the women in white. She then painstakingly inscribed every surface (animate and inanimate) with text lifted straight from her diary, rendered in formal Arabic calligraphy and applied with henna. The combination of calligraphy and henna is provocative.  (Until very recently in the Middle East, calligraphy was an art form practiced exclusively by men for the transcription of sacred texts, while henna is traditionally a woman’s art that marks ritual moments in female life.) The resulting chromogenic prints are nearly life-sized, in dimensions as large as 6 by 7.8 feet.

Zimmerli Art Museum:
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, one of the largest and most distinguished university-based museums in the nation, is located on the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Established in 1766, Rutgers is America’s eighth oldest institution of higher learning and one of the nation’s premier public research universities.  Zimmerli Art Museum houses more than 60,000 works, including the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union and rich holdings of 19th-century French prints and drawings and American art.

The Zimmerli is midway between New York City and Philadelphia and a short walk from the New Jersey Transit station in New Brunswick. For directions, please follow this link:   http://search.rutgers.edu/buildings.html…

Link to the Zimmerli exhibition page:  http://www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu//e…

Shehnaz Abdeljaber
Outreach Coordinator
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Rutgers, State University of NJ
Lucy Stone Hall, Room B323
54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue
Piscataway, NJ 08854
p (732)445-8444 x 25
 peaceingardens at comcast.net

_______________________________________________
 CMES-Events at lists.sas.rutgers.edu
 https://lists.sas.rutgers.edu/mailman/li…

Michael Klare, The Blowback Effect, 2020
Posted by Michael Klare, January 5, 2010, on TomDispatch.com
 http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175186/t…

You can already see a new style of writing about China emerging in our American world.  The New York Times set it off recently by publishing a front-page piece on a $3.4 billion Chinese investment in one of the planet’s last great copper reserves — in Afghanistan.  In passing, reporter Michael Wines also pointed out that Chinese energy companies had gained a stronger foothold in the future exploitation of Iraq’s massive oil reserves than had U.S. multinationals.  The ironies were legion and painfully visible.

Our two wars have been sucking us dry in two countries where state-owned Chinese companies have just scored significant economic victories.  “While the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda [in Afghanistan],” wrote Wines, “China is securing raw material for its voracious economy. The world’s superpower is focused on security. Its fastest rising competitor concentrates on commerce.”

Already, the follow-up pieces are starting to come out and heady cocktails they are:  one part awe and one part bitterness mixed with one part despair.  In Esquire online, Thomas P.M. Barnett put it this way:  “Worse still: Will the rest of the world end up profiting from our blood and money?… The reason why Obama neglects to mention any regional interests like Pakistan’s? Admitting the larger logic of regionalization would make too painfully obvious the nature of our current strategic bankruptcy. Because it would suggest that the only ‘victory’ to be found would be ‘won’ by those neighboring powers who did nothing to stabilize the situation. In other words, their ‘treasure’ and our ‘blood.’”  At Foreign Policy online, Stephen M. Walt chimed in:  “While we’ve been running around playing whack-a-mole with the Taliban and ‘investing’ billions each year in the corrupt Karzai government, China has been investing in things that might actually be of some value, like a big copper mine.”

Under George W. Bush, the U.S. set out, in part, to turn the Greater Middle East into an American “lake” of energy reserves via two invasions, and you know how that worked out.  The Chinese, on the other hand, only last year sent their warships abroad — to hunt pirates as part of an international flotilla in the Gulf of Aden — for the first time since the eunuch Zheng He commanded a Ming dynasty armada that reached Africa six centuries ago.  Unfortunately, as Michael Klare, TomDispatch regular and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, makes clear below, China’s leaders are as unlikely to learn from our deepest mistakes as they were 30-odd years ago when China’s post-Cultural Revolution leadership looked our way and made a logical but calamitous decision: that the auto industry — all those millions of individual cars burning fossil fuels — would be a crucial pillar of their future industrial development.

Right now, they may still seem to be acting out a key lesson of this American moment:  Stay off the hard stuff.  You know, all that advanced weaponry (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it), all those aircraft carrier battle groups, all those “expeditionary forces” ready to be sent thousands of miles from home to fight “little wars.”  Once again, however, as Klare suggests, our present symbols of “power” are likely to be their paragon and the future will be a mess.  It’s not enough, it seems, to make money, not war.  Once you have the money, it has to be spent on something and our imaginations remain so limited.

Too bad.  Here’s where you could only wish the future might be a little less predictable.  No such luck, Klare tells us, when it comes to military power as the measure of greatness on planet Earth in the second decade of the twenty-first century.  Tom

The Second Decade
The World in 2020
By Michael T. Klare

As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all.  If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects:  the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its foremost military alliance, to name just three.

By the end of the second decade of this century, however, our world is likely to have a genuinely different look to it.  Momentous shifts in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by 2020 as new actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the global space.  Nonetheless, all of this is the norm of history, no matter how dramatic it may seem to us.

Less normal — and so the wild card of the second decade (and beyond) — is intervention by the planet itself.  Blowback, which we think of as a political phenomenon, will by 2020 have gained a natural component.  Nature is poised to strike back in unpredictable ways whose effects could be unnerving and possibly devastating.

What, then, will be the dominant characteristics of the second decade of the twenty-first century?  Prediction of this sort is, of course, inherently risky, but extrapolating from current trends, four key aspects of second-decade life can be discerned: the rise of China; the (relative) decline of the United States; the expanding role of the global South; and finally, possibly most dramatically, the increasing impact of a roiling environment and growing resource scarcity.

Let’s start with human history and then make our way into the unknown future history of the planet itself.

The Ascendant Dragon

That China has become a leading world power is no longer a matter of dispute.  That country’s new-found strength was on full display at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December where it became clear that no meaningful progress was possible on the issue of global warming without Beijing’s assent.  Its growing prominence was also evident in the way it responded to the Great Recession, as it poured multi-billions of dollars into domestic recovery projects, thereby averting a significant slowdown in its economy.  It spent many tens of billions more on raw materials and fresh investments in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, helping to ignite recovery in those regions, too.

If China is an economic giant today, it will be a powerhouse in 2020.  According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), that country’s gross domestic product (GDP) will jump from an estimated $3.3 trillion in 2010 to $7.1 trillion in 2020 (in constant 2005 dollars), at which time its economy will exceed all others save that of the United States.  In fact, its GDP then should exceed those of all the nations in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East combined.  As the decade proceeds, China is expected to move steadily up the ladder of technological enhancement, producing ever more sophisticated products, including advanced green energy and transportation systems that will prove essential to future post-carbon economies.  These gains, in turn, will give it increasing clout in international affairs.

China will undoubtedly also use its growing wealth and technological prowess to enhance its military power.  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China is already the world’s second largest military spender, although the $85 billion it invested in its armed forces in 2008 was a pale shadow of the $607 billion allocated by the United States.  In addition, its forces remain technologically unsophisticated and its weapons are no match for the most modern U.S., Japanese, and European equipment.  However, this gap will narrow significantly in the century’s second decade as China devotes more resources to military modernization.

The critical question is:  How will China use its added power to achieve its objectives?

Until now, China’s leaders have wielded its growing strength cautiously, avoiding behavior that would arouse fear or suspicion on the part of neighbors and economic partners.  It has instead employed the power of the purse and “soft power” — vigorous diplomacy, development aid, and cultural ties — to cultivate friends and allies.  But will China continue to follow this “harmonious,” non-threatening approach as the risks of forcefully pursuing its national interests diminish?  This appears unlikely.

A more assertive China that showed what the Washington Post called “swagger” was already evident in the final months of 2009 at the summit meetings between presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao in Beijing and Copenhagen.  In neither case did the Chinese side seek a “harmonious” outcome:  In Beijing, it restricted Obama’s access to the media and refused to give any ground on Tibet or tougher sanctions on key energy-trading partner Iran; at a crucial moment in Copenhagen, it actually sent low-ranking officials to negotiate with Obama — an unmistakable slight — and forced a compromise that absolved China of binding restraints on carbon emissions.

If these summits are any indication, Chinese leaders are prepared to play global hard-ball, insisting on compliance with their core demands and giving up little even on matters of secondary importance.  China will find itself ever more capable of acting this way because the economic fortunes of so many countries are now tied to its consumption and investment patterns — a pivotal global role once played by the United States — and because its size and location gives it a commanding position in the planet’s most dynamic region.  In addition, in the first decade of the twenty-first century Chinese leaders proved especially adept at nurturing ties with the leaders of large and small countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that will play an ever more important role in energy and other world affairs.

To what ends will China wield its growing power?  For the top leadership in Beijing, three goals will undoubtedly be paramount: to ensure the continued political monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to sustain the fast-paced economic growth which justifies its dominance, and to restore the country’s historic greatness.  All three are, in fact, related:  The CCP will remain in power, senior leaders believe, only so long as it orchestrates continuing economic expansion and satisfies the nationalist aspirations of the public as well as the high command of the People’s Liberation Army.  Everything Beijing does, domestically and internationally, is geared to these objectives.  As the country grows stronger, it will use its enhanced powers to shape the global environment to its advantage just as the United States has done for so long.  In China’s case, this will mean a world wide-open to imports of Chinese goods and to investments that allow Chinese firms to devour global resources, while placing ever less reliance on the U.S. dollar as the medium of international exchange.

The question that remains unanswered:  Will China begin flexing its growing military muscle?  Certainly, Beijing will do so in at least an indirect manner.  By supplying arms and military advisers to its growing network of allies abroad, it will establish a military presence in ever more areas.  My suspicion is that China will continue to avoid the use of force in any situation that might lead to a confrontation with major Western powers, but may not hesitate to bring its military to bear in any clash of national wills involving neighboring countries.  Such a situation could arise, for example, in a maritime dispute over control of the energy-rich South China Sea or in Central Asia, if one of the former Soviet republics became a haven for Uighur militants seeking to undermine Chinese control over Xinjiang Province.

The Eagle Comes in for a Landing

Just as the rise of China is now taken for granted, so, too, is the decline of the United States.  Much has been written about America’s inevitable loss of primacy as this country suffers the consequences of economic mismanagement and imperial overstretch.  This perspective was present in Global Trends 2025, a strategic assessment of the coming decades prepared for the incoming Obama administration by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency.  “Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025],” the NIC predicted, “the United States’ relative strength — even in the military realm — will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained.”

Some unforeseen catastrophe aside, however, the U.S. is not likely to be poorer in 2020 or more backward technologically.  In fact, according to the most recent Department of Energy projections, America’s GDP in 2020 will be approximately $17.5 trillion (in 2005 dollars), nearly one-third greater than today.  Moreover, some of the initiatives already launched by President Obama to stimulate the development of advanced energy systems are likely to begin bearing fruit, possibly giving the United States an edge in certain green technologies.  And don’t forget, the U.S. will remain the globe’s preeminent military power, with China lagging well behind, and no other potential rival able to mobilize even Chinese-level resources to challenge U.S. military advantages.

What will change is America’s position relative to China and other nations — and so, of course, its ability to dominate the global economy and the world political agenda.  Again using DoE projections, we find that in 2005, America’s GDP of $12.4 trillion exceeded that of all the nations of Asia and South America combined, including Brazil, China, India, and Japan.  By 2020, the combined GDP of Asia and South America will be about 40% greater than that of the U.S., and growing at a much faster rate.   By then, the United States will be deeply indebted to more solvent foreign nations, especially China, for the funds needed to pay for continuing budget deficits occasioned by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget, the federal stimulus package, and the absorption of “toxic assets” from troubled banks and corporations.

Count on this, though:  in an increasingly competitive world economy in which U.S. firms enjoy ever diminishing advantages, the prospects for ordinary Americans will be distinctly dimmer.  Some sectors of the economy, and some parts of the country, will certainly continue to thrive, but others will surely suffer Detroit’s fate, becoming economically hollowed out and experiencing wholesale impoverishment.  For many — perhaps most — Americans, the world of 2020 may still provide a standard of living far superior to that enjoyed by a majority of the world; but the perks and advantages that most middle class folks once took for granted — college education, relatively accessible (and affordable) medical care, meals out, foreign travel — will prove significantly harder to come by.

Even America’s military advantage will be much eroded.  The colossal costs of the disastrous Iraq and Afghan wars will set limits on the nation’s ability to undertake significant military missions abroad.  Keep in mind that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a significant proportion of the basic combat equipment of the Army and Marine Corps has been damaged or destroyed in these wars, while the fighting units themselves have been badly battered by multiple tours of duty.  Repairing this damage would require at least a decade of relative quiescence, which is nowhere in sight.

The growing constraints on American power were recently acknowledged by President Obama in an unusual setting:  his West Point address announcing a troop surge in Afghanistan.  Far from constituting a triumphalist expression of American power and preeminence, like President Bush’s speeches on the Iraq War, his was an implicit admission of decline.  Alluding to the hubris of his predecessor, Obama noted, “We’ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.  In the wake of the economic crisis, too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills…. Meanwhile, competition in the global economy has grown more fierce.  So we simply can’t afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

Many have chosen to interpret Obama’s Afghan surge decision as a typical twentieth-century-style expression of America’s readiness to intervene anywhere on the planet at a moment’s notice.  I view it as a transitional move meant to prevent the utter collapse of an ill-conceived military venture at a time when the United States is increasingly being forced to rely on non-military means of persuasion and the cooperation, however tempered, of allies.  President Obama said as much:   “We’ll have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power…. And we can’t count on military might alone.”  Increasingly, this will be the mantra of strategic planning that will govern the American eagle in decline.

The Rising South

The second decade of the century will also witness the growing importance of the global South:  the formerly-colonized, still-developing areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  Once playing a relatively marginal role in world affairs, they were considered open territory, there to be invaded, plundered, and dominated by the major powers of Europe, North America, and (for a time) Japan.  To some degree, the global South, a.k.a. the “Third World,” still plays a marginal role, but that is changing.

Once a member in good standing of the global South, China is now an economic superpower and India is well on its way to earning this status.  Second-tier states of the South, including Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey, are on the rise economically, and even the smallest and least well-off nations of the South have begun to attract international attention as providers of crucial raw materials or as sites of intractable problems including endemic terrorism and crime syndicates.

To some degree, this is a product of numbers — growing populations and growing wealth.  In 2000, the population of the global South stood at an estimated 4.9 billion people; by 2020, that number is expected to hit 6.4 billion.  Many of these new inhabitants of planet Earth will be poor and disenfranchised, but most will be workers (in either the formal or informal economy), many will participate in the political process in some way, and some will be entrepreneurs, labor leaders, teachers, criminals, or militants.  Whatever the case, they will make their presence felt.

The nations of the South will also play a growing economic role as sources of raw materials in an era of increasing scarcity and founts of entrepreneurial vitality.  By one estimate, the combined GDP of the global South (excluding China) will jump from $7.8 trillion in 2005 to $15.8 trillion in 2020, an increase of more than 100%.  In particular, many of the prime deposits of oil, natural gas, and the key minerals needed in the global North to keep the industrial system going are facing wholesale depletion after decades of hyper-intensive extraction, leaving only the deposits in the South to be exploited.

Take oil:  In 1990, 43% of world daily oil output was supplied by members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (the major Persian Gulf producers plus Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Libya, Nigeria, and Venezuela), other African and Latin American producers, and the Caspian Sea countries; by 2020, their share will rise to 58%.  A similar shift in the center of gravity of world mineral production will take place, with unexpected countries like Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Niger (a major uranium supplier), and the Democratic Republic of Congo taking on potentially crucial roles.

Inevitably, the global South will also play a conspicuous role in a series of potentially devastating developments.  Combine persistent deep poverty, economic desperation, population growth, and intensifying climate degradation and you have a recipe for political unrest, insurgency, religious extremism, increased criminality, mass migrations, and the spread of disease.  The global North will seek to immunize itself from these disorders by building fences of every sort, but through sheer numbers alone, the inhabitants of the South will make their presence felt, one way or another.

The Planet Strikes Back

All of this might represent nothing more than the normal changing of the imperial guard on planet Earth, if that planet itself weren’t undergoing far more profound changes than any individual power or set of powers, no matter how strong.  The ever more intrusive realities of global warming, resource scarcity, and food insufficiency will, by the end of this century’s second decade, be undeniable and, if not by 2020, then in the decades to come, have the capacity to put normal military and economic power, no matter how impressive, in the shade.

“There is little doubt about the main trends,” Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in awarding the Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore in December 2007:  “More and more scientists have reached ever closer agreement concerning the increasingly dramatic consequences that will follow from global warming.”  Likewise, a growing body of energy experts has concluded that the global production of conventional oil will soon reach a peak (if it hasn’t already) and decline, producing a worldwide energy shortage.  Meanwhile, fears of future food emergencies, prompted in part by global warming and high energy prices, are becoming more widespread.

All of this was apparent when world leaders met in Copenhagen and failed to establish an effective international regime for reducing the emission of climate-altering greenhouse gases (GHGs).  Even though they did agree to keep talking and comply with a non-binding, aspirational scheme to cut back on GHGs, observers believe that such efforts are unlikely to lead to meaningful progress in controlling global warming in the near future.  What few doubt is that the pace of climate change will accelerate destructively in the second decade of this century, that conventional (liquid) petroleum and other key resources will become scarcer and more difficult to extract, and that food supplies will diminish in many poor, environmentally vulnerable areas.

Scientists do not agree on the precise nature, timing, and geographical impact of climate-change effects, but they do generally agree that, as we move deeper into the century, we will be seeing an exponential increase in the density of the heat-trapping greenhouse-gas layer in the atmosphere as the consumption of fossil fuels grows and past smokestack emissions migrate to the outer atmosphere.  DoE data indicates, for example, that between 1990 and 2005, world carbon dioxide emissions grew by 32%, from 21.5 to 31.0 billion metric tons.  It can take as much as 50 years for GHGs to reach the greenhouse layer, which means that their effect will increase even if — as appears unlikely — the nations of the world soon begin to reduce their future emissions.

In other words, the early manifestations of global warming in the first decade of this century — intensifying hurricanes and typhoons, torrential rains followed by severe flooding in some areas and prolonged, even record-breaking droughts in others, melting ice-caps and glaciers, and rising sea levels — will all become more pronounced in the second.  As suggested by the IPCC in its 2007 report, uninhabitable dust bowls are likely to emerge in large areas of Central and Northeast Asia, Mexico and the American Southwest, and the Mediterranean basin.  Significant parts of Africa are likely to be devastated by rising temperatures and diminished rainfall.  More cities are likely to undergo the sort of flooding and destruction experienced by New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.   And blistering summers, as well as infrequent or negligible rainfall, will limit crop production in key food-producing regions.

Progress will be evident in the development of renewable energy systems, such as wind, solar, and biofuels.  Despite the vast sums now being devoted to their development, however, they will still provide only a relatively small share of world energy in 2020.  According to DoE projections, renewables will take care of only 10.5% of world energy needs in 2020, while oil and other petroleum liquids will still make up 32.6% of global supplies; coal, 27.1%; and natural gas, 23.8%.  In other words, greenhouse gas production will rage on — and, ironically, should it not, thanks to expected shortfalls in the supply of oil, that in itself will likely prove another kind of disaster, pushing up the prices of all energy sources and endangering economic stability.  Most industry experts, including those at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, believe that it will be nearly impossible to continue increasing the output of conventional and unconventional petroleum (including tough to harvest Arctic oil, Canadian tar sands, and shale oil) without increasingly implausible fresh investments of trillions of dollars, much of which would have to go into war-torn, unstable areas like Iraq or corrupt, unreliable states like Russia.

In the latest hit movie Avatar, the lush, mineral-rich moon Pandora is under assault by human intruders seeking to extract a fabulously valuable mineral called “unobtainium.”  Opposing them are not only a humanoid race called the Na’vi, loosely modeled on Native Americans and Amazonian jungle dwellers, but also the semi-sentient flora and fauna of Pandora itself.   While our own planet may not possess such extraordinary capabilities, it is clear that the environmental damage caused by humans since the onset of the Industrial Revolution is producing a natural blowback effect which will become increasingly visible in the coming decade.

These, then, are the four trends most likely to dominate the second decade of this century.  Perhaps others will eventually prove more significant, or some set of catastrophic events will further alter the global landscape, but for now expect the dragon ascendant, the eagle descending, the South rising, and the planet possibly trumping all of these.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Owl Books). A documentary film version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation at Bloodandoilmovie.com.

Copyright 2010 Michael T. Klare

I just received the following and though I did not see the books yet, thought it interesting for posting these days of Copenhagen.

Now I know the subject of Climate Change is in – it even rates to having its own encyclopedia!

the SustainabiliTank.info editor

————————————————–

With the world gathered in Copenhagen, a broad, reasoned view of global warming is a welcome addition to the many voices on the subject.

The Encyclopedia of Global Warming goes beyond the science of this growing crisis and investigates the public policies and social issues that surround global warming and climate change.

This comprehensive reference covers the scientific explanations and describes the many factors involved. It also goes deeply into the debates and controversies that this subject spawns. Politicians, businesses, agencies and the general public are all heard from.

A quick description:

• Three volumes, including 1,320 pages
• 540 Essays and 149 sidebars and charts
• Appendixes, indexes and resource listings
• And free online access to its complete content

For more information, click: Encyclopedia of Global Warming.

Marvin Cabiness
Territory Manager
Salem Press
 mcabiness at salempress.com
(800) 221-1592 X 21

From Stephen Boehm: Why Carbon Offsetting Will Not Save the Planet – Book launch

A new book has been published to coincide with the Copenhagen climate summit.

‘Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets’
Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi (eds)

The book can be downloaded for free at
 http://mayflybooks.org/?page_id=194

The book will be launched in Colchester, UK, and Lund, Sweden (near Copenhagen); at both events some free copies of the book will be available:

The Old Library at Colchester Town Hall, West Stockwell Street, Colchester, UK
Wednesday 9 December 4-6pm
The event is free and open to all
 http://mayflybooks.org/?p=313

‘The atmosphere business: on the politics and organization of climate change’
Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden (1 hour from Copenhagen), room EC3-109.

15 December 2009, 12.30-17.00.
The seminar is free and open to all but the number of participants is limited. Please confirm your attendance by sending an email to  sverre.spoelstra at fek.lu.se
 http://mayflybooks.org/?p=309

Press release: 1 December 2009

Why Carbon Offsetting Will Not Save the Planet

Global carbon markets may well have been hailed as the saviour of the planet by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but in many ways they are doing more harm than good, according to new evidence. In fact, two academics from the University of Essex argue that measures put in place to reduce carbon emissions following the Kyoto Protocol on climate change have only made matters worse.

Launched to tie-in with the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen (COP15), Dr Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi’s new book, Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets, challenges the environmental claims made about carbon markets and carbon offsetting schemes. The book – which collates contributions from more than 30 leading experts – is another voice in the growing criticism about the business of carbon and how it has failed to deliver promised reductions in greenhouse gases.

Few would argue that climate change is the biggest challenge the world has ever faced, and reducing our carbon footprint is essential to the future of the planet. Carbon offsetting has become a multi-billion-dollar global business which has captured the imagination of organisations worldwide who want to do something to help combat global warming. The reality, however, is that many of these schemes have actually made matters worse.

Dr Böhm and Mr Dabhi, of the University of Essex-based Essex Business School, advise governments, businesses and other organisations to reduce their carbon footprint by undertaking initiatives closer to home than funding carbon offsetting programmes in deprived countries thousands of miles away.

‘Carbon offsetting and carbon markets haven’t really delivered the reductions of greenhouse gas emissions they claimed and in many ways have just made the problem worse,’ they explained. ‘These schemes have often just provided an incentive for big polluting companies to continue emitting greenhouse gases rather than to change their ways.’ ‘Often, carbon offsetting schemes have very negative effects on local communities and eco-systems in developing countries.’

The book contributes to a growing field of critics of carbon markets by highlighting several up-to-date examples of where the system has failed and often led to negative social, economic and environmental impacts in deprived countries.

‘Carbon markets simply don’t address the underlying and root causes of climate change, which is an over-consumption of finite fossil fuels,’ added Dr Böhm and Mr Dabhi. ‘We are addicted to oil, gas, coal and a whole range of other fossil fuels, which, when burned for heating, electricity generation or other usages, release greenhouse gases. It is now time to make up for the lost decade since Kyoto and start to deal with our underlying reliance on fossil fuels.’

‘This book is a very constructive and rigorous critique of CDM offset approaches to deal with carbon footprints. I recommend this book to any student, policy maker or administrator of climate change complexities in developed or developing countries.’ Professor Anil Gupta, Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad, India

‘If you wondered whether capitalism could ever produce the perfect weapon of its own destruction, try this heady mix of carbon fuels, the trade in financial derivatives, and more than a dash of neo-colonialism, and boom! But this book is far from resigned to that fate. After examining the case against carbon trading. the book turns to alternatives, to hope, to sanity, and to the future.’ Professor Stefano Harney, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

‘The politics of carbon trading is a subject far too important to be left to politicians, industrialists and technocrats. This is an issue that is affecting everyone on the planet. In this important book, a series of well known commentators explain the perverse economics that lies behind the impossible idea of trading our future for profit.’ Professor Martin Parker, University of Leicester, UK

‘Anyone concerned about the future of the planet (is anyone not?) should read this book. The contributors give powerful evidence and argument to show that the carbon trading regimes favoured by the world’s elites will not work – and are, indeed, set to make things worse. But the message is not negative. There are alternatives, both effective and desirable.’ Professor Ted Benton, University of Essex, UK

____________________________________________

Dr Steffen Boehm
Reader in Management
Essex Business School
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ UK
Rm 5NW.4.4
Tel. +44(0)1206 87 3843

The Honolulu based E A S T – W E S T  C E N T E R

Special East-West Dialogue on China and the Copenhagen climate talks.

The following is a new title in the East-West Dialogue publication series.

Click on the link for further information or to download the PDF file free of charge:

CLIMATE COMMITMENTS TO 2050: A ROADMAP FOR CHINA, by ZhongXiang Zhang with responses by Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jisun Kim, Raekwon Chung, and Stephen Howes. East-West Dialogue, No. 4. Honolulu: East-West Center, December 2009. 16 pp. Paper.
 http://www.eastwestcenter.org/pubs/3308

In this issue of East-West Dialogue:

Lead Article
“Climate Commitments to 2050: A Roadmap for China”
ZhongXiang ZHANG, Senior Fellow, East-West Center, provides an exposition of the likely Chinese negotiating position for international climate talks. Zhang discusses the significance of 2030 as a target date for an absolute emissions cap and advocates for three transitional periods of increasing climate obligations before China could meet an absolute emissions caps.

“Prospects for International Climate Negotiations: Copenhagen and Beyond”
GARY CLYDE HUFBAUER, Reginald Jones Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics, and JISUN KIM, Research Assistant, Peterson Institute for International Economics, respond to Zhang and also discuss wider issues in international climate talks and provide their speculation on the prospects for the Copenhagen talks.

“China Is Willing, but on What Terms?”
RAEKWON CHUNG, Climate Change Ambassador, South Korea, discusses the uncertainty of emissions trajectory and the legal nature of a “binding” commitment.

“Common Ground Must Be Found, and Fast”
STEPHEN HOWES, Professor, Crawford School of Economics and Government, Australian National University, focuses on the urgency of making commitments for 2013.

East-West Dialogue, a project of the East-West Center, fosters discussion and debate of key issues in Asia-U.S. economic relations. The Dialogue seeks to develop and promote innovative policy, business, and civic initiatives to enhance this critical partnership. Visit EastWestCenter.org (

 http://www.eastwestcenter.org/ewdialogue) for more information on the project and participants.
________________________________
The mission of the East-West Dialogue is to generate insights for deepening the Pacific partnership  based on regionwide discussion and debate.

________________________________
Linda Kay Quintana | Senior Editor, Publications | 808.944.7595

East-West Center
1601 East-West Road, Honolulu, Hawai’i 96848-1601
EWC Information: 808.944.7111 | Fax: 808.944.1235
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Today, Monday, 30th November, leading anti-poverty and environment groups were joined by Nobel prize winners and other international experts in calling for new economic models to support the climate deal to be negotiated in Copenhagen. In a new report, the sixth from The Working Group on Climate Change and Development, with forewords from R.K. Pachauri Phd, Chair of the IPCC and world leading environmental economist Prof Herman Daly, international development economists and major international agencies call for new economic approaches that are more in tune with people and the planet.

The report Other Worlds Are Possible: Human progress in an age of climate change includes proposals for new development models from leading economists based in developing countries.

From the report:

‘It is crucial that we engage in fresh ways of thinking about development and sustainability. This volume provides a valuable perspective to policymakers and financial institutions on how new development approaches can be achieved.’
R K Pachauri Ph.D, Chairman, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Director-General, The Energy and Resources Institute

‘Climate change, important as it is, is nevertheless a symptom of a deeper malady, namely our fixation on unlimited growth of the economy as the solution to nearly all problems.’
Prof. Herman Daly, University of Maryland, United States

‘The presumptions and aspirations of what constitutes a civilised life will have to be modified. The model popularised by ‘the American Dream’ is perhaps the most dangerous in this context, with its emphasis on suburban residential communities far from places of work, market and entertainment and linked only through private motorised transport.’
Prof. Jayati Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.

‘People have to feel that they belong, and the voice of the minority must be listened to, even if the majority has its way. We need systems of governance that respect human rights and the rule of law and that deliberately promote equity.’
Prof. Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of The Challenge for Africa

‘Solutions imply new models that, above all else, begin to accept the limits of the carrying capacity of the Earth: moving from efficiency to sufficiency and well-being. Also necessary is the solution of the present economic imbalances and inequalities. Without equity, peaceful solutions are not possible.’
Prof. Manfred Max-Neef, economist, Rector of the Universidad Austral de Chile

‘The alternative economic model described here revolves primarily around a revitalisation of rural economies, taking advantage of the synergies arising from consumption patterns at low-income levels (raising demand, production and consumption of basic goods, of and by low-income communities in a virtuous cycle).’
David Woodward, nef Fellow, and former economic adviser in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

________________________________

Andrew Simms
Policy Director and
Head of the Climate Change Programme

Our new book The New Economics: A Bigger Picture is now available from  Amazon. Read it to get a picture of a new economy as if people and the planet mattered. Have your questions about the bizarre contradictions of conventional economics answered. For example: Why is an Apparently Poor Pacific Island is at the Top of the Happy Planet Index? Why did China Pay for the Iraq War? Why has London Traffic Always Travelled at 12mph? Why do Modern Britons Work Harder than Medieval Peasants? Why are Cuban Mechanics the Best in the World? Why Does Britain Import the Same Number of Chocolate Waffles as it Exports? Why do Fewer People Vote when there is a Wal-Mart Nearby? And, Why are Malawi Villagers Paying the Mortgages of Surbiton Stockbrokers?

nef (the new economics foundation) -economics as if people and the planet mattered.
3 Jonathan St
London SE11 5NH
Registered Company No. 319 3399
Registered Charity No. 1055254

Tel: ++ 44 (0)20 7820 6355
Fax: ++ 44 (0)20 7820 6301
Switchboard: ++ 44 (0)20 7820 6300

Email:  andrew.simms at neweconomics.org
Website: www.neweconomics.org

Reviewing the OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND SOCIETY,  at the University of Copenhagen – December 11, 2009 – all invited.

The Copenhagen Symposium for the OXFORD HANDBOOK OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND SOCIETY will be held on 11 December, at the University of Copenhagen.

If you are attending COP-15, you are most welcome to attend. Several contributors to this forthcoming book will be discussing their chapters. See attachment for venue and program details.

RSVP is not required and attendance is free.

FIRST SESSION, 2pm?3.20pm

Introduction and Overview of the Handbook
John Dryzek, Australian National University
(for the editors, John Dryzek, Richard Norgaard, and David Schlosberg)

The Reconfiguration of Policy Discourses
Maarten A. Hajer, University of Amsterdam and Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency

Critique of Cost Estimates
Clive Spash, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia

From International to Global Climate Governance
Matthew Paterson, University of Ottawa

The Global South
Sivan Kartha, Stockholm Environmental Institute

SECOND SESSION 3.35pm-5pm

Comparative State Responses
Robyn Eckersley, University of Melbourne

Corporate Responses
Simone Pulver, University of California, Santa Barbara

Effects on the Welfare State
Ian Gough, University of Bath, and James Meadowcroft, Carleton University

International Justice
Paul Baer, Georgia Tech

New Modes of Governance
Frank Biermann, Free University of Amsterdam

Improving the Performance of the Climate Regime: Lessons from Regime Analysis
Oran Young, University of California, Santa Barbara (To be confirmed)

Thanks.

Hayley Stevenson
Postdoctoral Fellow
Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance
Political Science Program
Research School of Social Sciences
The Australian National University
CANBERRA  ACT  0200
Ph. +61 2 6125 1723
 http://polsc.anu.edu.au/staff/stevenson/

 http://deliberativedemocracy.anu.edu.au/

“Making Sense of Pakistan” – an attempt by Dr. Farzana Shaikh of Chatham House.

Dr. Farzana Shaikh of the Pakistan Study Group, Asia Programme, Chatham House, London, argues that “Vacuum Rules Pakistan.” She released now a book titled “Making Sense of Pakistan.”

In a recent op-ed in The Independent she wrote:  “there is now an almost fateful inevitability that a major terrorist attack in the UK will carry a Pakistani imprint.”
 http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/about/dir…

 http://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Pakis…

She argues that Pakistan’s transformation from a country once projected as a model of Muslim enlightenment to a state faced with a lethal Islamist challenge has dominated headlines in recent years;  while the failure of governance and the damage wrought by external powers have hastened this decline.

Pakistan’s problems are rooted primarily in its uncertain foundations as a nation, and its ambiguous relation to Islam. Both have heightened the contestation over the meaning of Pakistan and the significance of ‘being Pakistani’. This enduring ideological confusion has also thwarted a stable constitutional settlement, undermined the country’s economic future and encouraged a new and dangerous symbiosis between the armed forces and militant groups. Together they have left Pakistan prey to the forces of extremism that today threaten international stability.

Our website has long argued that the creation of Pakistan was a Muslim mistake and its present situation is a world problem – this rather then the Afghanistan issue – that the world must fear most.

Whatever – see her book for further insights.

The New York Synagogue Congregation of Rabbi Marc Schneier was host and  to Imam Shamsi Ali of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, the great Mosque at 3rd Avenue and 96th Street in Manhattan, are part of the “TWINNING” of Synagogues and Mosques.

The Jewish and Muslim communities, led by leaders from above named institutions and The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, helped by Russell Simmons, Chairman of the Foundation and Reverend Martin Luther King III, President and CEO, Realizing the Dream Foundation, started an effort to get close to each other as we posted on www.SustainabiliTank.info on January 15, 2007. This slowly evolved to meetings we covered on postings – March 15, and April 5, 2008. We were there from the start of the activity and contended that this could actually become also an example for the UN on how different ethnic groups can learn to live together. The Synagogue hosted a dinner with the Ambassador of Qatar, and that was a clear step in the correct direction.

That effort led to the Twinning idea that was then implemented first with the participation of 50 Mosques and 50 Synagogues in the US, November 21-23, 2008.

This year we had now the second such event with 100 twinning pairs – in the US, Canada, and France, the UK – and a movement that is expanding globally. Each pair in such a twinning picks their own topic for dialogue and evolving cooperation.

———————-

2nd Annual Weekend of Twinning of Mosques and Synagogues
Special Events              -November 13-15, 2009-
2nd Annual Weekend of Twinningsm of Mosques and Synagogues Across North America.

On November 13-15, 2009, the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding (FFEU), will sponsor the the 2nd Annual Weekend of Twinningsm. On that weekend, mosques and synagogues across North America will link up with each other to hold one-on-one programs dedicated to exploring commonalities in our religious practices, customs and traditions, and to building ongoing ties of friendship and trust between Jews and Muslims across the continent.

Last November, during our inaugural Weekend of Twinningsm, 50 Jewish and 50 Muslim congregations and organizations across the United States and Canada held one-on-one programs in cities across the continent, making the event the largest-ever gathering of Jews and Muslims anywhere in the world. This year, we expect an even larger number of participating mosques and synagogues, including members of those congregations which took part last year and many new people who may not have known about the last year’s event.

The Weekend of Twinningsm of Mosques and Synagogues Across North America has the endorsement of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), as well as other organizations like the World Jewish Congress (WJC), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Canadian Association of Jews and Muslims (CAJM).

The theme for the 2nd Annual Weekend of Twinningsm will be “Building a Common Agenda.” In addition to getting to know each other better and discussing commonalities, the twinned mosques and synagogues will devote time during the upcoming Weekend of Twinningsm to a discussion of issues on which they can work together fruitfully in the coming months and years. Among the societal issues which may be discussed include combating Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, saving the environment, fighting poverty, immigration reform, expanding health care coverage, and improving education in our communities.  In addition, we urge synagogues and mosques participating in the 2nd Annual Weekend of Twinningsm to involve their young people in the proceedings.

FFEU will offer ideas and share resources that will be helpful to mosques and synagogues preparing their programs for the Weekend of Twinningsm . We also can help congregations which would like to participate but are presently without a partner to find the best possible ‘twin.’

In 2008, the Weekend of Twinningsm received a great deal of media attention in North America and around the world. One sign that our effort to role-model a successful Muslim-Jewish partnership is spreading rapidly is that mosques and synagogues in Britain have agreed to take part in this year’s event. We also expect selected mosques and synagogues in other European countries to take part, making it a truly international event.

Mabruk, yashar koach and congratulations to the many wonderful people in grass-roots Muslim and Jewish communities across the U.S. and Canada who worked so hard to make the inaugural Weekend of Twinningsm such an inspirational success. Let us resolve to join together again to make this year’s, and to take the next important step in building solid ties of friendship and trust between Jews and Muslims in the United States and Canada.

For information on to how to get involved in the2nd Annual Weekend of Twinningsm , please contact:

Walter Ruby
Muslim-Jewish Relations Program Officer
Foundation for Ethnic Understanding
917 294-1772
————————–

The event hosted November 14, 2009 by the New York Synagogue Community was about mutual understanding of the concepts of Halal and Kosher – “IS HALAL KOSHER? IS KOSHER HALAL? ABRAHAM’S CHILDREN AROUND THE TABLE.”

Obviously, this was about learning each others religious habits, but the event gave me the possibility to raise the question with Walter Ruby, Program Officer of the Muslim- Jewish Relations Program of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.

MY ARGUMENT IS THAT AFTER THE TWO ETHNIC GROUP MEMBERSHIPS LEARN ABOUT EACH OTHER SO THEY DO NOT THINK THAT ONE GROUP REALLY HATES THE OTHER, WHY NOT CEMENT THIS RELATIONSHIP BY DOING IN COMMON THINGS THAT ARE OF FOCAL INTEREST TO BOTH GROUPS AND ARE NOT DIVISIVE. WHY NOT TRY DISTANCING THEMSELVES FIRST FROM THE DIFFERENCES INVOLVING THE MIDDLE EAST, AND FOCUS INSTEAD ON ISSUES OF IMMEDIATE COMMON INTEREST SUCH AS THE LOCAL ENVIRONMENT OR POVERTY and QUESTIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT LIKE CLIMATE CHANGE? By finding common interests, and seeing that cooperation is not just desirable but also possible, there may indeed later be also a way to cooperate in areas that are physically more remote. Yes, when talking real estate on the ground in the Middle East is difficult, but starting with climate change and air quality that does not recognize demarcation lines on the ground?  Here there is clearly a place for cooperation that humanizes the one you thought was an unrepentant enemy.      OK – I learned from Walter Ruby that this is the future line of this interesting cooperation.

——————————————-

From the meeting at the New York Synagogue, I walked up Park Avenue to the EXPLORERS CLUB where meetings were going on all day according to a special event titled “SEA STORIES.” The topics were:

Ty Sawyer presented – “HOW TO SAVE THE SEAS.”  He is the Editorial Director  of Islands Magazine a series of Diving Sport activities and publications. These folks dive to see things and are clearly interested in preserving nature. He is now based in Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, Florida. Talking to him I learned of his interest in using deep cold water from the sea as part of heat exchange system that can provide air-conditioning for Hotels of Hawaii Islands. He is a Florida based National fellow of the Explorers Club since 2002.

David W. Jourdan – “Never Forgotten – The Search and Discovery of Israel’s Lost Submarine Dakar.”  The speaker is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and has a Master degree in applied physics from John Hopkins University. He is not just a professional submariner, but also an inventor of technologies that save energy. His presentation dealt with his finding of the Dakar, but my conversation with him later was about sustainability. His scientific published work was in the areas of Doppler sonar navigation and oceanographic survey planning. In 1986, Mr. Jourdan co-founded Meridian Sciences, Inc., which became Nauticos Corporation in 1998. He is the principle owner and has served as President and General Manager, directing business and technical operations as the company pursues its mission to lead the world in ocean exploration. Under Mr. Jourdan’s direction, Nauticos has played a key role in the development of U.S. Navy capabilities for underwater research, has worked to develop offshore oil and gas technology, and has worked with the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and other media companies on projects of public interest. Mr. Jourdan has co-authored several papers concerning the use of remote sensing and navigation systems for underwater vehicles. In 1999, Mr. Jourdan was honored as Maryland’s Small Business Person of the Year and awarded Ernest and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in Science and Technology. He is a National Fellow of the Explorers Club since 2004.

Edward Von der Porten – “The Galleon San Felipe.” He is a naval historian and nautical archeologist who discovered treasures of Ming porcelain when he found the San Felipe that went under in 1576 off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. His presentation was in the  classic old style of the Explorers Club – an exploration for the sake of doing something original. He is a National Fellow of the Explorers Club since 1980.

Dr. Charles E. Rawlings – Portraits of “Living Mollusks.” He is a neurosurgeon, a lawyer, an underwater photographer and author. His real interest in life is to photograph living mollusks and does not care about collecting shells of dead mollusks. Now that is a fresh breath of air when it comes to the concept of exploration. He is involved with the Club since 1990 and has led several Explorer Club Flag Expeditions.

Jill Heinerth – “Into the Planet Using Circuit Rebreathers.” The only woman that spoke that day, she is a professional diver, photographer and film-maker. she pioneered the closed-circuit rebreather equipment technology that allowed her to dive through under water caves – be these in freshwater channels in Florida or Antarctic icebergs. She uses this technology for environmental studies involving also cases of  underground-water pollution. She got prizes for her technology but should eventually be rewarded for her potential environmental successes. She is not a member of the Explorers Club.
 http://jillheinerth.smugmug.com/Underwat…

Dr. Gregory Skomal – “Ocean Travelers: Tracking the World’s Biggest Sharks.” He heads the Massachusetts Shark Research program and spoke about that region, but showed us further specimens he filmed in other parts of the world. He authored the Shark Handbook as well as many more books on aquarium keeping. He is a scientist who studied shark migration and is not a member of the Explorers Club. http://hotnewsblogforu.blogspot.com/2009…

I did go a bit to length with this reporting because of the fact that I was quite impressed with the fact that the average age at this Explorers Club event was by 25 years lower then at usual events, and by the fact that most presenters, in my talking to them, seemed much more interested in taking pictures of what they found rather then collecting the findings as trophies. As such, this reminded me of my previous reporting from the Club’s events and of my previous effort at interesting the club in activities of environment value. It simply boggles my mind why is the New york Explorers Club, or the National Club as well, in the forefront of issues like climate change? As I observed before, with a recognized presence at the UN, as an NGO, the Club has not made its presence known – not on environmental issues or on any other issues either.

I used my presence last night to ask the good people that spoke, and that are connected to the Club, if they would not raise the same question also?

Our previous postings on www.SustainabiliTank.info regarding the Explorers Club:

An UPDATE – Dr. Perkins, leadership, The Explorers Club New York, The Lowell Thomas Awards Dinner 2009 and “Mountain Stories” October 15 and 17 events.
Sunday, October 18th, 2009

From Martha Shaw of earthadvertising.com about Walter Cronkite – “the Journalist explorer” – having been a “Spokesperson for the Planet” after having had his career of discussing in our living rooms the matters of the world. Whatever we think about him – a Walter Cronkite is needed for Climate Change these days of “The Age of Stupid.”
Friday, July 31st, 2009

Film Series at the Explorers Club, New York – June 13-14, 2008. Still no interest in Global Warming/Climate Change, but even so the events are interesting and always beg the question – so what now? Do we look at what climate change will/does to these great places?
Sunday, June 8th, 2008

OK. It Is Promotion of Tourism, But We Have High Respect For The Maori/New Zealand/Aotearoa – so please go to the Explorers Club, New York City, February 7, 2008.
Monday, January 28th, 2008

Publisher Rodale Books announced Tuesday that the former vice president’s book, Our Choice, will be released  November 3rd, printed on 100% recycled paper.

The book, which proposes solutions to the global warming crisis documented in “Inconvenient Truth,”  was called The Path to Survival when first announced two years ago.

An Inconvenient Truth was published in 2006 and was a companion book to the Academy Award-winning documentary of the same name.

Looking forward to reading Jan Lundberg’s book “Petrocollapse: the Basis for Crash and Culture Change”?  See the book flyer at
 http://www.culturechange.org/Petrocollap… .  Release is in several weeks.  Get your copy at a discount off anticipated list price.
Inquire via email: jan [at] culturechange.org

Culture Change
P.O. Box 4347, Arcata, CA 95518 USA, tel/fax: 1-215-243-3144
 http://www.culturechange.org

Please send any feedback or questions via email to  info at culturechange.org

02 November 2009

Copenhagen Is Supposed to Fail. DIY!

by Jan Lundberg
20 October 2009
Much passionate concern is flying around regarding the United Nations meeting on climate this December in Copenhagen. We hear it from honest activists and from politicians who sound trustworthy on this most crucial matter. An example is Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Great Britain, who deserves a prize for eloquence in warning us of climate change.
However, there is something many people have not yet learned about politicians and technofixers seeking too much continuity.

What to do? In the absence of visible leadership on climate protection — leaders that aren’t sell-outs or technocratic dreamers — I can only think of “do it yourself.” (DIY. For ideas on DIY and living the future now, scan our Culture Change articles and contacts for networking.)

When the Prime Minister was quoted with solemn hope by the credulous news media on Oct. 19, I responded with the following statement for the Global Warming Crisis Council listserve. When my words were praised, I decided to release my statement more widely, as is:

Don’t be taken in by Gordon Brown or any other approved savior regarding the climate crisis.

My prediction for the UN Copenhagen meeting is that it cannot and will not do anything but promise policies that hinge on the technofix, instead of actually moving toward the immediate slashing of greenhouse gas emissions. After all, how could any head of state or climate official in a corporate-dominated world really try to cut back on industrial activity to a significant degree? It would be not just political suicide but literally.

The only way that expected discussed “cuts” can be arrived at is by designing theoretical reductions from the switching of energy practices over time. Too much time, too many people, no way to adequately replace petroleum.

It does not matter how sincere or passionate any of the official international compromisers are who “represent’ humanity. Their technofix is a lie, and that’s what the so-called leaders are signed up for. So shouldn’t the rest of us act accordingly, pro-actively? Perhaps a promise of reaction could be issued to them beforehand, announcing that we know they intend to only fail. At least it could make clear to a large audience, somehow, that we know that the process is set up for failure and that we’re always being bullshitted.

Keep in mind that the passionate messengers of dire effects of climate change earn trust by identifying the problem, and then they revert to imbeciles or deceivers by claiming the answer is different energy technology to be expanded or developed. Never a cultural change, never the abandonment of the car, or rejection of the whole bankrupt System. A lot of people have been fooled by the technofixsers, the only “good actors” to get a consistent forum in the play of good cop/bad cop (the bad cops are fossil fuels & nuclear business-as-usual). The game is rigged and is a fraud, so another game (culture) is overdue.

Jan Lundberg
Culture Change
 http://culturechange.org

The above is in response to

PM warns of climate ‘catastrophe’ Brown: ‘50 days to save world’
BBC News

The UK faces a “catastrophe” of floods, droughts and killer heatwaves if world leaders fail to agree a deal on climate change, the prime minister has warned.

Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming and break the “impasse”.

He told the Major Economies Forum in London, which brings together 17 of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas-emitting countries, there was “no plan B”.

World delegations meet in Copenhagen in December for talks on a new treaty.

‘Rising wave’

The United Nations (UN) summit will aim to establish a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto treaty as its targets for reducing emissions only apply to a small number of countries and expire in 2012.

Mr Brown warned that negotiators were not reaching agreement quickly enough and said it was a “profound moment” for the world involving “momentous choice”.

“In Britain we face the prospect of more frequent droughts and a rising wave of floods,” he told delegates.

“The extraordinary summer heatwave of 2003 in Europe resulted in over 35,000 extra deaths.”

Grim warning

“On current trends, such an event could become quite routine in Britain in just a few decades’ time. And within the lifetime of our children and grandchildren the intense temperatures of 2003 could become the average temperature experienced throughout much of Europe.”

The costs of failing to tackle the issue would be greater than the impact of both world wars and the Great Depression combined, the prime minister said.

The world would face more conflict fuelled by climate-induced migration if a deal was not agreed, he added.

He told the forum, on the second day of talks in the capital, that by 2080 an extra 1.8 billion people – a quarter of the world’s current population – could lack sufficient water.

Mr Brown said: “If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice.

“So we should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the catastrophe we face if present warming trends continue.”

Agreement at Copenhagen “is possible”, he concluded.

“But we must frankly face the plain fact that our negotiators are not getting to agreement quickly enough. So I believe that leaders must engage directly to break the impasse.”

Environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth said Mr Brown had rightly identified the importance of securing a “strong and fair” climate deal.

Executive director Andy Atkins said the environmental and economic impacts of failing to tackle global warming would “dwarf anything seen before”.

He said: “The next few weeks are crucial in determining the long-term future of the planet. The world must pull back from the brink and take urgent action to slash its emissions.”

The Major Economies Forum is not part of the formal UN process and so firm commitments are unlikely to come from the meeting.

It is seen instead as a gathering where countries can explore options and positions in a less pressured environment.

[original article at Brown on BBC News - video of Brown included.]

To prepare the world for disappointment, the leaders of nations (read: mostly corporate tools) are lowering expectations. This is supposed to be tolerated as the spin poses “developed” nations against “less developed.” Falling flat on their faces, the nation heads and their corporate masters are trying to remain in charge by leading us nowhere: anywhere but a vastly lowered energy future with the socioeconomic restructuring needed for a sustainable culture.
The no-action plan is laid out by the New York Times in their Oct. 20 article, Hopes Fade for Comprehensive Climate Treaty.

Meanwhile, reports from the corporate-cozy media keep us off balance by teasing us with hints that some agreement can be reached for a meaningful climate treaty. Or, at other times, it’s back to the idea that no agreement should be expected — as an acceptable fact of life. After all, industrialism is a given, a good, to be unquestioned. But really now! To preempt Copenhagen before we are betrayed once again, a movement would have to come forth that rejects the technofix-activists’ prerequisite that we need the scale of energy practiced by modern living.

* * * * *

The above indented commentary and article appeared on the Global Warming Crisis Council listserve on October19, 2009. To join GWCC for news and commentary, sign up at:https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/gwcc
Alternatively, you can send a blank email to gwcc-subscribe [at] lists.riseup.net

My book Petrocollapse: the Basis for Crash and Culture Change contains more analysis and suggestions for action, such as the Pledge for Climate Protection. See the book flyer at Petrocollapse: the Basis for Crash and Culture Change. Release is in several weeks. Order now at a discount off anticipated list price. Email me at jan [at] culturechange.org. – Jan Lundberg

COMPRENDRE LA COMPENSATION CARBONE.
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Editeur : Pearson

Prix : 9.95€

Aujourd’hui, chacun peut « compenser » ses émissions de carbone sur Internet, en quelques clics, lorsqu’il achète un billet d’avion. Mais que signifie au juste « compenser » ? Comment la compensation est-elle arrivée jusqu’au particulier ? Qui compense volontairement, et comment ? La compensation carbone est-elle un moyen efficace de lutter contre le réchauffement climatique ou sert-elle simplement à alléger notre conscience, et celle des entreprises, à bas coût ?

Benoît Leguet et Valentin Bellassen apportent des explications et des réponses claires et concises à toutes ces questions, qui concernent autant les entreprises que les particuliers.

La “compensation carbone”, qu’est-ce-que c’est ? La compensation carbone s’inscrit au nombre des instruments qui sont à notre disposition pour tenter de résoudre le problème du réchauffement climatique. S’appuyant sur l’idée que des gaz à effet de serre émis en des points différents du globe ont un effet identique sur le réchauffement, ce système propose à qui désire améliorer son impact climatique de financer des projets de réduction des émissions, afin de contrebalancer ses propres rejets de gaz à effet de serre. Un système de calcul élaboré permet de rendre les réductions effectuées grâce à ce financement équivalentes aux gaz à effet de serre émis. On dit alors de ceux-ci qu’ils ont été « compensés », et de l’activité qui les a produit (trajets en avion ou en voiture, chauffage, consommation d’énergie, etc.) qu’elle est « climatiquement neutre ».

Les auteurs
Benoît Leguet est diplômé de l’Ecole polytechnique (spécialité Economie environnementale).
Valentin Bellassen est diplômé de l’ENS (spécialité Ecologie, Biodiversité, Evolution) et doctorant en sciences de l’environnement.
Ils sont respectivement chef de projet et chargé d’études à la Mission Climat de la Caisse des dépôts sur les projets réducteurs d’émissions et la compensation carbone.

La Mission Climat est un centre de ressources qui anime et coordonne les travaux de recherche et de développement dans le champ de l’action contre le changement climatique. Elle réunit une équipe d’économistes et d’ingénieurs spécialisés.

Soutien promotionnel de la Caisse des dépôts, par l’intermédiaire de la Mission Climat.

Public
- Dirigeants d’entreprises, responsables développement durable et environnement, responsables communication
- Toute personne ayant une conscience écologique et souhaitant être mieux informée sur la compensation carbone

Sommaire
1. L’effet de serre : égalité dans le réchauffement, diversité dans les émissions
2. Quand on ne peut plus réduire, on peut toujours compenser
3. Dans le monde du protocole de Kyoto, la compensation a déjà 7 ans : l’âge de raison
4. Les réductions d’émissions de ces projets sont-elles réelles ?
5. La compensation volontaire a 3 ans et commence à trouver ses marques
6. En route vers la standardisation : une quête de garanties de qualité sur le marché volontaire
7. Compenser, c’est déjà réduire, mais ce n’est pas encore refroidir

Nombre de pages : 96
Date de parution : 14/11/2008
Public : Grand public averti

Frank McCourt, ‘Angela’s Ashes’ Author, Dies at 78

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Frank McCourt, a former New York City schoolteacher who turned his miserable childhood in Limerick, Ireland, into a phenomenally popular, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, “Angela’s Ashes,” died in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 78 and lived in Manhattan and Roxbury, Conn.

Related

A Storyteller Even as a Teacher (July 20, 2009)

Review: ‘Angela’s Ashes’ (September 17, 1996)

ArtsBeat: Share Your Memories of Frank McCourt

The cause was metastatic melanoma, said Mr. McCourt’s brother, the writer Malachy McCourt.

Mr. McCourt, who taught in the city’s school system for nearly 30 years, had always told his writing students that they were their own best material. In his mid-60s, he decided to take his own advice, sitting down to commit his childhood memories to paper and producing what he described as “a modest book, modestly written.”

In it Mr. McCourt described a childhood of terrible deprivation. After his alcoholic father abandoned the family, his mother — the Angela of the title — begged on the streets of Limerick to keep him and his three brothers meagerly fed, poorly clothed and housed in a basement flat with no bathroom and a thriving population of vermin. The book’s clear-eyed look at childhood misery, its incongruously lilting, buoyant prose and its heartfelt urgency struck a remarkable chord with readers and critics.

“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”

“Angela’s Ashes,” published by Scribner in 1996, rose to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for more than two years, selling four million copies in hardback. The next year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Two more installments of his life story followed: “ ’Tis” (1999), which described his struggle to gain a foothold in New York, and “Teacher Man” (2005), an account of his misadventures and small victories as a public-school teacher. Both, although best sellers, did not achieve anything like the runaway success of Mr. McCourt’s first book, which the British director Robert Parker brought to the screen in 1999.

Not to be outdone, Mr. McCourt’s younger brother Malachy, an actor, brought out two volumes of his own memoirs: “A Monk Swimming” (1998), which also made the best-seller list, and “Singing Him My Song” (2000). Then, when it seemed that the McCourt tale had been well and truly told, Conor McCourt, Malachy’s son, gathered the four brothers, got them talking and filmed two television documentaries, “The McCourts of Limerick” and “The McCourts of New York.”

It was “Angela’s Ashes” that loomed over all things McCourt, however, and constituted a transformative experience for its author.

Speaking to students at Bay Shore High School on Long Island in 1997, he said, “I learned the significance of my own insignificant life.”

Born in New York

Francis McCourt was born Aug. 19, 1930, on Classon Avenue on the edge of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where his Irish immigrant parents had hoped to make a better life. It was not to be, largely because his father, Malachy, usually spent his scant laborer’s earnings at the local bar. Beaten, the family returned to Limerick when Frank was 4, and the pattern repeated itself.

Three of Mr. McCourt’s six siblings died in early childhood. The family’s circumstances were so dire, he later told a student audience, that he often dreamed of becoming a prison inmate so that he would be guaranteed three meals a day and a warm bed. At home, the staple meal was tea and bread, which his mother jokingly referred to as a balanced diet: a solid and a liquid.

When Frank was 11, his father went to work in a munitions factory in Britain and disappeared from the picture. Frank stole bread and milk, which became the family’s principal means of support. After dropping out of school at 13, he delivered telegrams and earned extra income writing letters for a local landlady.

Douglas Healey

In 1949, Mr. McCourt, at 19, gathered his savings and boarded a ship for New York and a new life, which began unpromisingly. Finding a job at the Biltmore Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, he was put in charge of the 60 caged canaries in the public rooms. Thirty-nine of them died, whereupon Mr. McCourt taped the lifeless bodies to their perches. The ruse did not work.

A series of laboring jobs followed, interrupted by the Korean War. Drafted into the Army, Mr. McCourt served as a dog trainer and later a clerk in West Germany.

A Career as a Teacher

Despite his lack of formal schooling, Mr. McCourt won admission to New York University, where he earned a degree in English education in 1957. A year later he began teaching at McKee Vocational High School on Staten Island, an eye-opening experience that he recalled, in often hilarious detail, in his third volume of memoirs, “Teacher Man.”

In his first week, an unruly student threw a homemade sandwich on the floor, an act that astonished Mr. McCourt not so much for its brazenness as for the waste of good food. After appraising the sandwich with a connoisseur’s eye, he picked it up and ate it.

Mr. McCourt developed an idiosyncratic teaching style that found a somewhat more receptive audience at the elite Stuyvesant High School, where he taught creative writing after earning a master’s degree in English from Brooklyn College in 1967. He had students sing Irish songs to break down their resistance to poetry. After discovering a sheaf of written excuses from past years, he recognized an unexplored literary genre and asked students to write, say, an excuse letter from Adam or Eve to God, explaining why he or she should not be punished for eating the apple.

He even had students test themselves. “When they wrote their own tests, they asked questions they wanted answers to and then they answered them,” Mr. McCourt told the journal Instructor. “It was grand.”

Testing Literary Waters

On the side, Mr. McCourt made fitful stabs at writing. He contributed articles on Ireland to The Village Voice. He kept notebooks. But at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village, where he became friends with Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, he felt like an interloper, he said. They were writers. He was just a teacher.

“I had no idea he had the ambition, much less the ability to carry it off in such spectacular fashion,” Mr. Hamill, who first met Mr. McCourt at the Lion’s Head in the 1960s, said in a telephone interview.

In 1977, Mr. McCourt and his brother Malachy, who was acting and bartending in New York, cobbled together a series of autobiographical sketches into a two-man play, “A Couple of Blaguards,” which opened off Off Broadway at the Billymunk Theater on East 45th Street. They performed a revised version at the Village Gate in 1984 and again at the Billymunk in 1986 and took their show to several other cities.

This excursion into the past, along with his nagging sense that a writing teacher should write, motivated Mr. McCourt to undertake his childhood memoirs after he retired from teaching in 1987. An early attempt, when he was studying at New York University, had fizzled out, but three decades later, he said, he had worked through his awkward, self-conscious James Joyce phase and had gotten beyond the crippling anger that darkened his memories.

“After 20 pages of standard omniscient author, I wrote something that I thought was just a note to myself, about sitting on a seesaw in a playground, and I found my voice, the voice of a child,” he told The Providence Journal in 1997. “That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book.”

Still, his plans were vague. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I had to write it anyway,” he said in another interview. “I had to get it out of my system.”

A persistent friend demanded to see what Mr. McCourt was writing, then turned the pages over to a literary agent, Molly Friedrich, who submitted the incomplete manuscript to Scribner. It was bought immediately.

Critics, enchanted by Mr. McCourt’s language and gripped by his story, delivered the kind of reviews that writers can only dream of. But the book was ultimately a word-of-mouth success.

An instant celebrity, Mr. McCourt did his utmost to resist becoming the designated spokesman for all things Irish, “from agriculture to the decline in the consumption of claret in the West of Ireland,” as he once joked.

In Ireland itself, the reaction was mixed. “When the book was published in Ireland, I was denounced from hill, pulpit and barstool,” he told the online magazine Slate in 2007. “Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother’s name and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.”

Time healed at least some wounds. Mr. McCourt was awarded an honorary doctorate by Limerick University, and curious tourists can now take “Angela’s Ashes” tours of the city.

A Translation to Film

In 1999, the British director Alan Parker translated the memoir to the screen, with Emily Watson as Angela (who died in 1981), Robert Carlyle as Malachy Sr. (who died in 1985) and three actors in the roles of Mr. McCourt as a small, medium-size and grown boy.

For the Irish Repertory Theater, Mr. McCourt devised a history lesson disguised as an evening of storytelling and singing, titled “The Irish … and How They Got That Way.” It opened in 1997 to less than rapturous reviews. His second volume of memoirs, “ ’Tis,” which began with his arrival in New York, also encountered rough weather from critics still giddy from the memory of “Angela’s Ashes.” Although his storytelling gifts were in full evidence, Mr. McCourt was taken to task by many critics for being bitter and self-pitying, a marked contrast to the stoic tone of “Angela’s Ashes,” putting off many readers.

With “Teacher Man,” Mr. McCourt rallied. Although criticized as lumpy and episodic, the book was praised for its humane inquiry into the role of the teacher and the possibilities of education.

Mr. McCourt’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In 1994 he married Ellen Frey McCourt. She survives him, as do his brothers Malachy and Alphie, both of Manhattan, and his brother Mike, of San Francisco; his daughter, Maggie McCourt of Burlington, Vt.; and three grandchildren.

“I think there’s something about the Irish experience — that we had to have a sense of humor or die,” Mr. McCourt once told an interviewer. “That’s what kept us going — a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.

“And it did help because sometimes you’d get desperate,” he continued. “And I developed this habit of saying to myself, ‘Oh, well.’ I might be in the midst of some misery, and I’d say to myself, ‘Well, someday you’ll think it’s funny.’ And the other part of my head will say: ‘No, you won’t — you’ll never think this is funny. This is the most miserable experience you’ve ever had.’ But later on you look back and you say, ‘That was funny, that was absurd.’ ”

“The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity” – a book
by Sir Nicholas Stern as presented by Joanne J. Myers to the Carnegie Council – Ethics in International Affairs, New York City – May4th, 2009.

 http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcrip…

The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.

Ma4y 4, 2009

Introduction JOANNE MYERS: I’m Joanne Myers, Director of the Public Affairs Program. On behalf of the Carnegie Council, I’d like to welcome our members and guests, and to thank you for joining us on this rainy Monday morning.
Today, our speaker is a world-renowned economist, Nicholas Stern.

Lord Stern is a man of many achievements. But the one that is most relevant to our discussion this morning is his work on climate change. Since the release of the 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change, commissioned by Gordon Brown when he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, this seminal document and the ongoing debate on this subject has made Lord Nicholas the man to turn to when questions about the costs and benefits of dealing with global warming arise.

In fact, from what I’ve read, it seems as if almost every significant discussion of climate change since has drawn heavily on his findings. This report has now been transformed into a book for the general public and is entitled The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.

In focusing on the economics of climate change, Sir Nicholas shifted the debate away from polar bears and unseasonable summers and reframed the argument in the cold language of the balance sheet. In The Global Deal, Lord Stern evaluates our economic future and the essential steps we must take to protect growth and reduce poverty while managing climate change. He is guided by three principles, those of effectiveness, efficiency and fairness. By proposing green technologies, international emissions trading, and financing to halt deforestation, he lays out the technological and economic foundations for new industries by which he believes we can overt a catastrophe.

At the heart of his work is a simple calculation, which is if the science of climate change is right, the transition costs incurred by switching to low-carbon economy will, however daunting, be a fraction of what we will face by averting disaster. In other words, the cost of doing nothing about global warming would be very high, while the cost of transforming our energy system would be relatively low.

Climate change is often an awkward issue for governments to address, as the costs are immediate, while benefits only accrue in the future. Even so, understandings will be vital this year, as the world’s nations and their negotiators count down toward a UN climate conference to be held in Copenhagen in December. This is a target day for concluding a grand new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that reduced carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions by industrial nations.

While we may be a planet in peril and the global financial crisis could distract us from the bigger task of tackling climate change, Lord Stern sees global warming as an opportunity to bring forward investments in low-carbon technologies. In the long-term, these efforts could provide sustainable and well-founded economic growth.

Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to a very distinguished guest. We are honored to have you with us.

——–

Remarks

NICHOLAS STERN: Thank you very much, Joanne. That was a very kind introduction. And thank you all very much for coming today.

Since the Stern Review was published two and a half years ago, much of my time has been spent, since I’m back in academic life, arguing with my fellow economics professors about the best way to look at these issues. And we’re doing all right with that. They’re starting to understand just how big this is and what that means for the kind of economics that they have to bring to bear. So I sort of went back into academic life and wrote academic papers, which you wouldn’t want to read unless you’re heavily into mathematical economics.

But the other part of what I’ve been doing is working with people around the world, particularly in developing countries, which was the big part of my professional life before I got involved in climate change. In Europe, my own country the U.K., still part of Europe, and the U.S., for two years or so, I’ve been intensely involved in these discussions. And these have shaped, in large measure, the structure of the book, and indeed, my motivation for writing the book.

So what I want to do in the time I’ve got is to explain something about the global deal. How would we come to an international agreement to tackle climate change? What would it look like? What principles should it be built on? But before you can do that, you have to understand yourself why it is that you need such an agreement. But also, the quantitative analysis of why you need such an agreement actually shapes the agreement itself in very large measure.

So what I want to do is to begin with the logic of the problem, why it’s so important, the scale of what we have to do, because that shapes everything else. The scale shapes everything else, and the logic of the problem itself, because it’s a risk management problem, with long time lags. That also shapes the kind of agreement that we should be putting together and the difficulties in putting it together. So let me explain, from the beginning, in a very simple and fast way, I hope, the basic science, how that shapes the economics you should bring to bear to analyze the problem. And then on the basis of those things, what the global deal should look like.

I know that most of you are not economists. There’s a lot of economics underlying what I will say. I won’t go into it in any detail. The fact that you’re not economists is your fault. Most of you would have had the opportunity at some point in your life, and you didn’t take it. But I am not going to dwell on that. But those of you who are economists will recognize that there’s quite a lot of difficult stuff underlying what I have to say.

So here is the problem. It starts with people and it ends with people. People, through their lives, their production consumption, the way they live, emit greenhouse gases. They emit more greenhouse gases than the earth can absorb. And therefore, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rises. So there is a flow stock problem. And that’s critical to the logic of the whole thing. The flow of emissions, because they’re not fully absorbed, adds to the stock.

The next link in the chain is from the increase in stocks of greenhouse gases to temperature increases. That’s the very simple greenhouse effect. It’s a piece of science that goes back nearly 200 years now to French mathematician and physicist, Fourier. By the end of the 19th century, the gases that were causing this effect were basically identified, and there was some initial quantitative work on how big some of these effects might be.

The greenhouse effect is very simple physics and chemistry. Those of you who have been in a greenhouse will have noticed that it’s warmer in the greenhouse than outside. The very good reason is that the glass in the greenhouse prevents some of the infrared energy escaping, and that’s how the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere works. It’s not mysterious or complex or dubious science. It’s just a very basic physics and chemistry effect.

So from global warming, from increased concentrations, increased temperatures, from increased temperatures to climate change. And the language of climate change is the language we should use, not global warming, because it’s climate change that causes the problem. And most of it’s through water, in some shape or form. Storms, floods, droughts, sea level, sea level rise. The temperature does have a direct effect, in some cases, through heat stress, changing the length of growing seasons and so on. But basically, it’s the effect of the increased temperature on the climate that’s the issue. And, of course, those effects, storms, floods, droughts, sea level rise, have a very direct impact on people.

So that’s the logic of the problem: Key aspects of that chain of events—there were five links in the chain, you were counting, that I just described. The logic of that problem shapes the economics and the politics of it all in a very profound way. First, the atmosphere doesn’t recognize where the greenhouse gases came from. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Los Angeles or Beijing or Johannesberg or London. They have the same effect. It’s global in its origins and it’s global in its impact. That global feature of the problem is absolutely fundamental.

There are lots of things that we do in life that damage what other people can do. When we take our car out, we slow other people down. If we emit, as we did in London and many other places, soot from coal fires, we give people bronchitis and heart disease. But you can see, in a very direct way, how these effects are working. They’re local, and the effects are fairly observable, and they’re fairly immediate. This is a global problem and many of these effects have long legs. So the links in the chain I describe, some of them take years or even decades to manifest themselves. That, again, affects the politics of all of this in a fairly profound way. So by the time you see these effects with their full force, it’s actually too late to head many of them off.

So you can see the way in which the logical structure here has a profound effect on what you should do and how you should do it and how you see your relationships with others. Also, this flow stock story is critical because it means the costs of delay are immense. When you have a collapse of WTO talks, as we do in life, you get together five years later, and it’s a pity that you lost those five years, but you resume roughly where you were. This is not the case with climate change, because you would have had those increased flows which increase the stocks. And you’re in a more difficult starting point five years down the track.

So this logical structure, the problem, is very important in what you can do in the politics of it all. I’ll come back to that in just a moment in one or two respects, although it runs right through what I’m saying in the book. But let me just describe the magnitude. And here, you will need a little bit of mental arithmetic. It’s not hard stuff. But it’s very important that we get a feel for the numbers. We start around where we are now, around 435 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. That’s the measure of the stock, the concentrations, at the moment, 435 parts per million of CO2 equivalent. 380-something of that is CO2. And then the rest is other greenhouse gases translated into CO2 equivalent. We’re adding about two and a half parts per million a year. And that two and a half is rising. So since the two and a half we’re adding a year is rising, averaged over a century, we would be adding, on average, well over three parts per million a year. So a century of that, it’s a bit over 300. Add a bit over 300 to 435. If we didn’t do much, at the end of the century, we’d be about 750 parts per million.

If we stopped it right there, what would the temperature eventually be within a decade or two or three? It would be about probably around five degrees centigrade, or roughly 50/50 probability of being above or below five degrees centigrade. All of this has to be expressed in probability. This is a risk management issue. What does five degrees centigrade look like? Well, we’re not sure because we haven’t been there for about 30 million years as a planet. We’ve experienced five degrees below that quite often. Well, very recently, actually, 10 or 12,000 years ago, the last Ice Age when the ice sheets came down roughly to New York and London, natural benchmarks for latitude.

But where were people? Of course, there were quite a lot of people around 10, 12,000 years ago. People have been around 100—well, it depends how you count people, but 100,000, 200,000, depending on your definition of Homo Sapiens, or depending on your definition of sapiens, I suppose. But 100/200,000 years, humans have been around, we haven’t seen five degrees centigrade for 30 million years. At that time, the Eocene period, the world was covered in swampy forests. Very little ice, anyway. Five degrees centigrade below, we have seen, much more frequently.

And, of course, both of these things, five degrees up or five degrees down, transform where people can be. They rewrite the rivers. They rewrite the coastlines. Most of where we are, as humans, is shaped by rivers and coastlines. Southern Europe would probably look like the Sahara Desert. People would have to move. People would move on an enormous scale, just as they moved when it was five degrees centigrade lower. People haven’t seen five degrees centigrade higher, nowhere near. Three degrees centigrade 2 or 3 million years ago.

Again, way, way before humans. So we don’t really know how we would react to that, other than to be able to say where we could live and how we could live would be radically different. The snows would go off the Himalayas, the big rivers of the world would get rewritten—I mean, the big rivers of the world, in terms of the populations that they present. The big majority of them, not all of them, of course, but the big majority of them arise in a few hundred square kilometers of the Himalayas. Now, if you just go clockwise around from the Yellow River to the Yangtze to the Ganges and the Brahmaputra and the Jumna and the Indus. You’re talking about rivers that are the main sources of water for countries with a couple of billion people, with a billion or so or more directly affected by those rivers. You would just rewrite where people would be. Populations would move. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would move, and we would have extended world conflict.

This is not Nick Stern, the economist, describing this. This is simply Nick Stern relaying to you what the science tells us in a very direct way. But I’m expressing it in a way that allows us to start thinking about this as an insurance story or a risk management story in what we’re ready to pay to reduce the odds. If we held these concentrations of greenhouse gases below 500 parts per million, which we could with strong action, and I’ll describe what it is and what it would cost, if we held those concentrations below 500 parts per million, that 50/50 probability being above five degrees centigrade would come down to something like 3 percent. And that’s a huge insurance gain, a huge rich risk reduction, if we did manage to hold it below 500 parts per million.

We can’t hold it below 450. We will be at 450 in about six years. I mean, we’re adding two and a half a year, and six times two and a half is 15. Add that to 435. You know, in six years, we’re at 450. But we can hold below 500. And we can also be thinking about how we bring it on down from there. It takes a while to do that, and even 500 is a very dangerous place to be. Far, far less dangerous than 750, obviously. But we could work out how to bring it on down from there.

What would it cost us? Very roughly speaking—I could have told the story in three, four, five, six degrees centigrade, but just to be specific and to cut down the time, I told it in terms of five. But it’s the whole distribution that counts, not just one particular temperature like five degrees centigrade. What would it cost us? Well, relative to business as usual, we would probably have to take out about 65 gigatons of CO2 equivalent. What do we have to do? We have to get down from the over 50 gigatons that we emit each year at the moment. We have to get down to about 20 gigatons by 2050. That’s, roughly speaking, the path associated with holding below 500. In 1990, we were at 40 gigatons. So getting down to 20 gigatons in 2050 is cutting by 50 percent, relative to 1990.

So globally, the kind of path I described of holding below 500 involves getting down to about 20 gigatons as a flow. 500 is the stock. Getting down to about 20 gigatons is a flow by 2050. And that involves —depends on how you define business as usual, but taking out around 65 gigatons. And now you have to do another piece of arithmetic. It’s only multiplication. It’s not hard. 65 gigatons. We could probably do that at an average, and an average costs about $30 a ton. So $30 a ton times 65 gigatons. Well, you’ve obviously got 195 in there or 1.95 or 19500, however you do the numbers, and, of course, you’ve got to get your decimal points in the right place when you do this sort of thing. You’ve got to remember that giga is billion. Scientists like giga. Economists like billion. But giga, billion, same thing. So it’s actually, when you multiply 65 gigatons or 65 billion tons by $30 a ton, it’s 1.95 trillion, 2 trillion dollars, close enough.

What will world income be in 2050? It’s a bit over 50 trillion now. If we’re sensible and follow good policies in climate and elsewhere, it could easily double. I mean, not if we don’t, but it could easily double. That makes the arithmetic and the percentages easy. We’re a bit over 50, so a bit over $100 trillion in 2050. So two in 100 or so is around 2 percent. So you can build this up through boring old economic models and so on. But it’s very important to get a feel for why these numbers are what they are.

So for around 2 percent of GDP—I picked that for the year 2050, but it might look something like that for a while, for the next few decades—you buy this enormous reduction in risk. You make the difference between probably destroying the planet, as far as it is a place for life in any sense for humans, as we know it—that’s if you do nothing—but if you act sensibly and pay this very modest insurance premium, you can reduce the risks to levels which are probably manageable.

So that’s basically the story. What does it look like if you try to do this? Well, in the first place, a properly constructed green recovery would help us to get out of a recession. That’s the very, very short run. For the next two or three decades, we will create a technological revolution similar to, probably bigger than, the railways, electricity, the motor car, or IT. We will create a, those of you who like your economic history, we will create a Schumpetarian technology innovation investment-driven story of growth for the next two or three decades. When we get to low carbon growth, we will have something—because it’s the next three, four or five decades that’s the transition to that story—but when we get there, we will have a form of growth which is cleaner, more energy secure, quieter and more biodiverse.

And if we run the clock forward just a bit more, we will have reduced the risk of the transformation of the planet, which would occur as I just described it. This is a no-brainer. I mean, you’ve got the short run returns, you’ve got the driver of the technological story for the next two or three decades, you create a form of low carbon growth that’s much more attractive, and you drastically reduce the risks of major transformation of the planet. It’s just good sense, basic economics.

The wise investors and the wise business people are already out there seeing where this is going. And it’s even getting detailed. I mean, in Korea’s green recovery, they say, well, if the U.S. is going to build a smart grid, smart grids need smarter plants, they’re going to be made here in Korea. And people are already running through this story, seeing the opportunities.

But what we can’t do is pretend that there are no investment costs in this transition. There are investment costs in this transition. They’re serious. But they’re manageable. And they will happen, provided that the governments of the world set the right kind of framework for this to happen. And it means economic policy. It means a price for carbon, through attacks or a trading scheme or a bit of each. It means regulations. It means regulations on emissions. It means doing what we’ve just done in the U.K., announcing that there won’t be any more coal-fired power stations without carbon capture and storage. These are the kinds of policies it needs. It needs public, private partnerships in helping develop new technologies. It needs strong and clear policies to get there.

But basically, here we are. We know the kind of scale that we have to act on. We know the kinds of areas where we have to act, energy efficiency, low-carbon technology, and stopping deforestation. We know the economic instruments that we have to use. “Know,” in this sense, means have a good idea of. But we know enough to set off down the road. And we’re going to discover and learn like mad along the way. So we know the scale, we know the areas where we have to act, we know the kind of economic instruments. It’s now a matter of political will. And it’s this year that is absolutely crucial for putting that political will together.

I’ve already described, actually, one way or another, many aspects of the global deal. But let me now just pull out the global deal, from what I’ve said.

The global deal, if it’s going to be agreed and sustained, will have to be effective on the scale that’s necessary. I’ve already described that.

It will have to be efficient. That will be crucial because there will be serious costs of investing in the transition. It’s crucial to keep those costs as low as possible. If people think we’re wasting money pursuing those policies, then those policies will become politically fragile.

And it’s got to be equitable. Because otherwise, the different countries around the world, the different groups in the population will not support it or would not stay supporting it.

It has to be led by the rich countries. The rich countries, in terms of early action and I think it has to be led by the poor countries in terms of design. Because it’s the poorer countries of the world who are affected earliest and hardest, although we’re all affected, in the story I just described, in a very profound way.

But it’s the rich countries who have to take the lead in action. Why? Because they’re responsible, the 1 billion, out of the 6.7 billion, who live in rich countries, are responsible through their economic history for something like 60 to 65 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now. They’re largely responsible, through the pursuit of high carbon growth; but this is a very difficult starting point.

We really wouldn’t have wanted to start from here. But we are where we are. And it’s the rich countries who are largely responsible through that pursuit of high carbon growth in the past. Of course, they’re better off, and they have the better developed technologies. So I think the responsibility for early and strong action clearly lie there.

Where do we have to go to in terms of what each country should look like now? Well, I’ve already said we’ve got to get down to 20 gigatons, and I’ve explained why. In 2050, there will be 9 billion of us, roughly speaking, plus or minus a few hundred million. There will be 9 billion. So if we’re emitting, as a world, 20 gigatons, and there are 9 billion of us, remembering again that giga and billion are the same thing, 20 divided by 9, you can all do that, even on a Monday morning, is just over 2. So we’ve got to be down to 2 tons per capita as well, roughly speaking.

Where are we now? Well, Europe, Japan is 10, 12 tons per capita. So to get from 10 to 12 to 2, divide by 5, cut by 80 percent. There’s nothing mysterious in the idea that rich countries should be cutting by 80 percent. 1990 to 2050, it just follows from the arithmetic.

Now, the United States is over 20 per capita. And Barack Obama said we’ll cut by 80 percent, 1990 to 2050. He really meant 90 percent. Because, you know, to get from over 20 down to 2, you’ve got to divide by 10, right? But never mind, we’re a very tolerant lot in Europe. The basic thing is if you set out strongly down the right road, a lot of the arithmetic, a lot of the technology is going to sort itself out later on.

We shouldn’t get overly hung up about exactly 80 or 90 percent. It does matter to have a strong view of where we’re going. And it does matter to set off down that path in a strong way. I mean, that’s what’s crucial. So when we get to Copenhagen, the 2050 will be the anchor for the arithmetic. There’s going to be some very hard bargaining, and there should be, over 2020. Because 2020 is surely an indication of whether we’re serious about getting to where we want to go in 2050. And that’s going to be where, I think, hard stuff is going to come. And it’s already coming in Copenhagen. The Waxman-Markey Bill talks about 7 percent reductions by 2020, relative to 1990 for the U.S. That’s a tough ask, actually, for the U.S., because they’re already 16, 17 percent above 1990. So to get back to 7 percent, below 1990, by 2020, as in Waxman-Markey, means taking off about a quarter in a decade.

Now, this is where the politics of this is going to get tough. Because there are two ways of looking at 2020. I’m sure there are many ways of looking at 2020, but here are two. 2020 is the midpoint between 1990 and 2050. They’re arithmetically unexceptionable. And 2020 is 10 years after 2010. Again, we can’t quarrel with the arithmetic. But the perspective is fundamentally different. Because in countries like the U.S. and Canada, and I was in Canada a couple of days ago talking to environmentalists and others, and there it’s a good deal higher in the U.S. relative to 1990. So to get, say, the U.S. as in Waxman-Markey, I take out of 25 percent in the next ten years is going to be tough.

But then, you know, sitting in India or China or Indonesia or Brazil or South Africa, you’re saying, “I see, you’re going to cut by 80 percent , 1990 to 2050. And at the halfway stage, 80 percent you’re going to take out in six decades. And after three decades, you’ve taken out 7 percent?” How serious does that sound?

So you can see why these two different perspectives on 2020 matter. And I think as a world, we have to recognize we’ve only been serious about this for two or three years. And we are getting serious about this. And that’s what makes me more optimistic about getting a global deal. So that’s going to be hard bargaining and very difficult. But I hope we can get there. It’s going to need a lot of mutual understanding.

But here it is. I more or less described the global deal. It’s 50 percent reductions overall, 1990 to 2050. If people keep going on about percentages, just bring them back to the 20 gigatons in 2050, because that’s what really counts, and the path to get there. 50 percent reductions overall, 80 percent reductions for rich countries.

None of this is going to work unless the developing countries are absolutely at center stage. 8 billion out of the 9 billion people in 2050 are going to be in currently developing countries. If the rich world was emitting precisely zero in 2050, then the average for the developing world would have to be not 2, but 2 1/2 tons per capita. This cannot work unless the big majority of people in the world are involved.

So that’s essentially a story which says that over the next ten years, the developing world will embark on climate change action plans. China described a climate change action plan two years ago, India one year ago, Brazil and South Africa at the end of last year. They’re starting to develop serious engagement in working out how to cut emissions. Now, where I see the global deal working out is the developing world explains to the rich world, these are the conditions. This is conditionality of the developing world on the rich world.

Take those 80 percent cuts you’re talking about. Be credible over the next decade. Develop the technologies. Share them with us. We’ll be developing technologies. We’ll share them with you also. The biggest producer of photovoltaics is in China. One of the biggest windmill producers for electricity is in India. They will be sharing technologies both ways. But develop the technologies, share them with us, help us with the finance, help us with adapting to climate change, because it’s really happening and it will happen, and we need to invest to protect ourselves against what’s going on and to pursue development in a more hostile climate.

You do all of these things, those are our conditions, and we will commit now to taking on targets, say from ten years time. In the meantime, here are our climate change action plans. Please help us with those, because the more you do, the more we can do. This is the way in which this discussion is starting to move, and I think it should move. But building on the kind of commitments, the rich countries are already indicating that they’ll take on.

Trading will be very important, both to bring the costs down, and to allow flows from rich countries to poor countries. The sharing of technologies, I’ve already described. We need explicit mechanisms for doing that. And I’m very happy to discuss those in questions. We have to stop deforestation. It’s responsible for 20 percent of emissions. There’s no way we can achieve these targets without stopping deforestation. China is reforesting, it’s not deforesting. India has declared for a target of 33 percent of the area forested. I think it’s about 22, 23 percent now, isn’t it? So if India makes it, that’s a big change too.

But, of course, it’s the tropical forests which really count—Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Congo, Central America, and so on. Those are the big things that really count there. We have to stop deforestation. That has to be a battle which is integrated into the whole development story. You can’t tackle deforestation in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brazil unless you help those governments create alternative opportunities, more productive agricultural opportunities outside agriculture, improving the ability to develop and enforce property rights and so on. It has to be integrated in the development story. So you’ve got to stop deforestation.

And we need to look, again, at the challenge of the Millennium Development Goals and beyond about financing for development. Because when we did those calculations—and I am partly responsible, it’s a shared responsibility, for not building climate change in as we should have, because I was Chief Economist at the World Bank when the UN had its Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey in 2002, and I led the writing of the Report for the Commission for Africa in 2005. And in each case, we understated the challenge of climate change for development. But we have to face up as a world to the extra costs of meeting development goals in the context of a changing climate.

So there you are. That’s the global deal. The targets, the trading, the technologies, the finance, the deforestation, and the adaptation story. Huge amounts of detail to work on. But it’s the framework that really counts.

Will we get there? I don’t know. But if we say it’s all too difficult, then nothing is ever going to work—and the U.S. is not going to give up its big hydrocarbon cars, and the British are too lazy to do anything, and the Chinese always cheat—you can tell, I can sit in a bar and tell the story. It’s very easy to do. But if you believe that, what is the consequence?

Well, you can’t wiggle out of the science. I mean, it’s basically clear and there. So if that’s what you really believe, you’re saying, well, we’ve got another 50, 100 years to go in terms of the kinds of life that we got used to leading. And we will, over that period so transform the planet, so that we’ll be living actually in very different and much more difficult ways. So if you’re negative and pessimistic about all this, it’s self-fulfilling. We won’t get there if you all say it’s all too difficult. And the consequences will be very severe. We must be honest about those consequences. So,buy a hat, some suntan lotion and write a letter of apology to your grandchildren. If you really want to push the negative part of the story. So the challenge is not, is it ever going to work? Yeah, it’s all too difficult. The challenge is what do we have to do to try to make it work?
Will we succeed? Of course there’s no guarantee that we’ll succeed. But we can see the way in which we have to try and the way in which we have to work together. And we can see the kinds of scale of activity. We can see the kind of technologies. We can see the kind of economic instruments. We know enough to embark down this road with purpose. If we don’t get a strong agreement in Copenhagen at the end of this year—not all the details, the details can be worked out later. But if we don’t get the basic framework, I would really worry about whether we’ll be able to put it together. Because it falls apart, people go away, and, you know, it might take a long time before we get back together again.

In the meantime, you’ve done a lot of damage in terms of increased concentrations. In the meantime, confidence in the markets that are going to sustain these kinds of investments would have been undermined. So not getting an agreement in Copenhagen, with the basic outlines, not all the details, would be very, very damaging. So this is a crucially important few months for the world really in terms of decision making.

And there’s no way that—you can’t negotiate with the basic scientific processes. You can’t negotiate with the concentrations in the atmosphere. They will be what they will be if we’re neglectful.

I’m much more optimistic than I was two or three years ago because you can see and hear the way in which the understanding and commitment on this issue has changed, whether it be in China or India or the United States or elsewhere. You can see the way that’s changed. The pace of change of technology has been quite remarkable. It’s impossible to give a talk like this to business people without going away with a pocket full of cards if somebody’s got some great idea about how to reduce emissions, how to pull the greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. If one tenth of these ideas work that are just sort of bubbling through, we can have a whole range of ways of acting, all of which will cost a bit, probably, but, you know, some will be more successful than others.

So in terms of the changing politics, in terms of changing technologies and investments, I’m much more optimistic than I was two or three years ago. I think we’re going to get there in Copenhagen. And the months that follow, I really don’t know. But we’ve got a chance there that we can blow now. And, you know, human beings are not bad at messing up opportunities. But there is an opportunity now to mess up. And one of the reasons I wrote the book was try to reduce the probability that we might. Thank you very much.

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Questions and Answers

QUESTION: Lord Stern, thank you so much for a great talk. Are we being maybe even too optimistic? You paint a pretty bleak scenario, if we don’t do this. Should we have contingency plans in place that would suggest that we need not $30 a ton, but maybe $75 by 2015? Because what we are now seeing with the positive feedback loops, positive in a scientific sense, particularly the change in the Arctic, much more emissions of methane from both the tundra, undersea, et cetera, all of these things, which you know, which would suggest that the window we have to get this done may even be shorter. And therefore, we should be, contingency-wise, at least prepared intellectually to pay a higher cost because the time to get it done is perhaps much shorter than we think it is?
NICHOLAS STERN: These positive feedbacks, things like the melting of the permafrost and releasing a lot of methane, the collapse of the Amazon, which could well happen around three degrees centigrade, which we might be at in 50, 60 years, the decreasing acidity, so the increasing acidity of the oceans which decreases the absorptive capacity, all of these things actually are usually omitted from the formal scientific models. Complication, grounds, difficulty in quantification, but they’re very real possibilities. So it actually does look more worrying than when we were writing two and a half years ago, although all of the basic line of argument is the same.

I think that the description that I gave of cutting by 50 percent as a world, 1990 to 2050, is actually quite unambitious, relative to science. And indeed, many scientists will tell you very loudly what you’re doing, you’re telling me to cut by 50 percent? It should be 80 percent globally by 2050. Although, of course, it is quite ambitious in the point of view of the economics. And many people would draw the conclusion that you drew, that we should be acting faster and more strongly. And therefore, you would be thinking of higher, high costs. Because the faster you do it, the more it costs. So I think that relative to the magnitude of the real scientific problem, I’ve erred on the side of caution.

I’ve erred on the side of caution on the economics. I’ve erred on the side of recklessness, if you like, on the science. So if I were to be pushed to shift in a direction from the one I just articulated, I would certainly go in the direction that you described, that we should be stronger than I am describing, not weaker. And you can make that case, and perhaps you should. I should emphasize, I am talking about average costs. A lot of the costs of what we do actually are negative. I mean, if we’re sensible about a lot of the energy efficiency options we have, we save money. But it won’t all be negative costs. And on the margin, it will be, of course, a good deal higher.

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QUESTION: One problem we face seems to be that we are locked in by the present technology that exists in the U.S., in China, in Europe. Every week, on average, a new coal-fired power plant is being opened in China, with the effect of about 1,000 megawatts. And it’s calculated for over 25 years. And today, as we speak, China is (inaudible) based on clean coal. If they continue to run these, according to their business plan, we will be far off the mark that you have indicated that we need to reach.

So those, the owners, the countries and the private owners of these plants seem, to me, to be unlikely to close down these plants without compensation or to retrofit them. And just imagine what it would cost to retrofit the power of coal fire power plants of this world with carbon capture and storage. It would also increase the energy price by today’s standard by, let’s say, 40 percent . This is, of course, site specific. So what we seem to need is a new set of economic incentives, which means going steps further from the Kyoto mechanisms, which provided some incentives which have worked in some countries, and to provide a larger global scheme that gives the developing countries where the emissions will increase the most, like China, positive incentives for change. And I haven’t seen, so far during the run-up to the Copenhagen, any proposal in pretty language which provides that scene and which links a positive cash flow with achieved reduction targets. I would like to hear your comment on what needs to be done in that direction.

NICHOLAS STERN: I think the ballpark you’re talking about, 40, 50 percent increases in prices of electricity around the world for a few decades, is probably roughly right. If you take a rich country, something like 4 percent of GDP would be primary energy. If you increase that cost by 50 percent , you get back to the 2 percent of national income I’m talking about. So if we’re talking about increasing the price of electricity 50 percent in many places for a while, that is a price that we should be quite ready to pay. And we probably would have to.

My acquaintance with India is much deeper than China. I’ve been living in India, on and off, for different parts of the last 35 years. But I’ve been living in China, again, on and off for 20 years. And the change in China in the last two or three years is quite remarkable in terms of their understanding of the issues. And the 11th five-year plan which finishes at the end of next year, had a a 20 percent reduction target of energy to output, which they probably will reach—of course, if output goes up by 40, 45 percent , and the energy use goes up by 20 some percent, which is what’s happened—but I think the 12th five-year plan, which starts in the end of next year, beginning of the year after—and they’re already working on it and preparing an energy strategy, which would actually precede the 12th five-year plan—I think is likely to have emissions targets rather than energy targets. This is all discussions over the last few months and weeks. But I think that’s where it’s going.

Will countries like China, in terms of growth ambitions, energy ambitions, will they achieve the kinds of transformations we’re talking about without substantial sharing of technology and substantial finance? The answer is no. I described briefly some importance of sharing technologies. But let’s look at the kind of schemes of the trading finance for RT that could do it. Some of you will know about the Clean Development Mechanism, which is a project by project trading arrangement. It’s designed under the Kyoto Protocol, but mostly driven by the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, whereby a firm that has to meet a target under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, can buy a reduction in a developing country. But it’s organized on a project basis. And the firm itself in the developing country, which is selling it to the firm in the rich country, has to show and has to be approved by various committees at the country level in Bonn and so on has to show that it will be cutting its emissions relative to what it might have done.

“What it might have done” is counterfactual. You want to know what I might have done? Well, here is what I might have done. You know, it’s quite difficult to work with this kind of apparatus. And it’s very, very heavy. What we’re going to need for a while, I think for ten or 15 years, possibly more, and we do have to negotiate this at Copenhagen, is a successor to the Clean Development Mechanism, which is one-sided trading, in the sense that you get rewarded if you go down. But you don’t get penalized if you go up. Which can work on a wholesale way.

So the Province of China decides under its program that it’s going to have no further investment in coal-fired without carbon capture and storage. Then we can identify quite clearly the kind of reductions that would involve much more easily than the project by project scheme. And what we should be envisaging is wholesale funds, which arise from the ambitious kind of caps we’ve got in Europe and I trust we will have in the U.S., so that firms combined that fund, and that fund could take a slice of this Province of China that’s embarking on this program.

So I think if we replace the Clean Development Mechanism with something that’s much more suitable for wholesale, that’s programatic, as opposed to project-based, then we could envisage financial flows. And we’ve been modeling them a bit. And they probably would be of the order of somewhere between 100 and 200 billion a year by the 20s under these kind of trading arrangements. That’s the kind of financial structure, trading structure that we would need for a while to support these kinds of investments. And we’ve got to be quantitative and open and direct about what’s involved. There’s another story, of course, in proving that these carbon capture stories technologies work on a commercial scale. And that’s something we have to embark on again, as a world where different countries do different things. The Australians are doing a few, there are a few in the U.K., I’m sure. Canada is doing a few. I’m sure there will be more than a few in the U.S. So at the same time, as we work on the finance, we have to work on the sharing of the technology as well. But that’s exactly the kind of detail we have to work on. And we have to be frank about the scale of what’s involved.

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QUESTION: Thank you again, Lord Stern, for that magisterial performance, which doesn’t surprise any of us. But since I suspect you’re largely preaching to the converted here, I wonder if I might ask you to rebut two of the more persuasive arguments being made by those who disagree with you and with the global warming, simply so we can get those arguments knocked down. And I hear them all the time.

The first is from sort of the view of the Bjørn Lomborg School of the skeptical environmentalist, who essentially sidesteps the case you’re making by saying that even if what you’re saying is true, with the expenditure required to deal with it now is excessive in relation to how much more good you can do to the world by spending a fraction of that money dealing with other things like Malaria and AIDS and development to stop poverty, and drinking water and things like that, and that this is, therefore, a misplaced sense of priority.

And a second argument is broadly what one might call the American conservative argument that says that expecting the world to organize itself today to impose costs upon itself now for possible dangers 100 years down the road is essentially politically irresponsible, that the technologies will find solutions before things ever get that bad. And in the meantime, we should leave well enough alone and let us take care of today’s people, who, of course, happen to be today’s voters, as well. You are going to be imposing short-term costs on people who are not going to necessarily see visible benefits for the costs and pain you’re inflicting upon them. I think those two arguments do require some sort of response from someone like yourself. And I’d love to hear it.

NICHOLAS STERN: I think the response is actually implicit in what I already said. But the challenge you’ve drawn out is absolutely right because this is what we do here. I know Bjørn Lomborg reasonably well. And he’s a rather engaging fellow. But I think he’s more of a stand-up comic than a serious contributor to this. And he’s not an economist or a scientist.

But that’s by the by. Let’s take the argument. What’s the argument? That there are better ways of investing. There’s a whole collection of mistakes in the argument. The first one, and in many ways, the most important, is to treat these as separate projects. The two defining challenges of our century are overcoming world poverty and managing climate change. I’ve spent the big majority of my professional life on the former. One of the reasons I feel so strongly about climate change is that is for the reasons I described, it would undermine the progress that we’ve made and reverse it. We succeed or fail on these two defining challenges together.

As I described it, most of the effects of climate change and their damaging form on human lives come in water in some shape or form. They’re inextricably interlinked. It is just a simple failure in logic to treat the problems of development and water management separately from those of climate change. So when you set it up as sort of separate investment projects with the internal rate of return, you’re just making a basic analytical mistake in relation to the logical structure of the problem. So the argument is just deeply flawed and deliberately misleading.

He also, very deliberately, understates the magnitude of the problem. And he takes lower estimates. He takes means. He doesn’t look at distributions. And he doesn’t look beyond the end of this century. So within that overall structural logical mistake, there are all kinds of subdiffusions of cooking the books along the way. It’s a kind I just described. Deliberately taking lower estimates, deliberately taking means and not looking at distributions, when this is a risk management problem, and deliberately curtailing the time period. I could go on. I mean, there’s mistake after mistake in there, including the discussions of discounting, in the context of a future that depends on what you do now in a very big way. Most of economics, when it discusses discounting, looks at some assumed growth path and thinks a little (inaudible) associated with investment projects around that path, which, again, is an analytical mistake of huge importance in this kind of context, when what the future looks like, including whether or not we’re better off, depends profoundly on what we do now.

So I could go on. But as I say, Bjørn tells a very good case, and he’s a very engaging guy, actually. You ought to listen to him, it’s worth going to, but just remember, he’s wrong.

The conservative story, as you portrayed it, is partly answered by what I’ve just said. Because implicit in the plausibility of that story is the notion that these effects down the track are not that big. So you’re saying, why should we give up what seems to be a lot now in return for something which, you know, is a bit uncertain and accrues to people who are going to be much richer, much richer than us? And more to the point they don’t have a vote.

Well, the answer to that is that you don’t have to give up that much now. And some of it looks very exciting and positive. I don’t want to say you don’t have to give up anything now. That would be wrong and misleading. You do have to invest now. But it has tremendous returns beyond simply the climate change story, which I described. So I think it’s very important to come back first with two things.

One is, that do you realize the magnitude of the changes that we’re potentially talking about here?

And secondly, point to the very positive parts of the story as well. But this is something which requires enormous leadership. When we gathered together as a world in 1944 at Bretton Woods, we had seen 30 years of global warfare and great depression. We could see, in a very direct way, what goes wrong if we don’t think ahead and we don’t collaborate. The evidence was, you know, in blood in very recent history.

This one, we’re having to say, look, this is actually much bigger, in many ways, than these World Wars and the Great Depression. But in 50 years, 100 years down the track, some things much earlier, but in terms of its big magnitude, this is a great test of rationality for human beings. It’s not simply that they can get scalded and say, getting scalded is not a good idea, I’ll avoid getting scalded. That’s the evolutionary approach to learning. This is a big challenge for us, in terms of rational human beings. We’ve got to anticipate this one. It doesn’t make it any less real. But it means it’s less real in terms of direct experience.

So that’s the great challenge for political leadership. That’s why communication is so important. That’s journalism communication is so important. I had a long discussion with Rahul Ghandi about how this can become a current political issue in India. In India, of all places, people understand the consequences of water, storms, floods, droughts. If ever there was a place in the world, no necessity to explain that to people, that they know. But it’s linking, linking that to action in India now, linking action in India now to what other people might do as a world. That’s the challenge of communication. I think it’s enormously important that we take that on.

JOANNE MYERS: I thank you really very much for bringing all of these issues to us today. They’re very important. And I want to thank you for making such a strong case. Thank you.